The surge in well­ness cul­ture in T&T and around the re­gion is be­ing wel­comed by Amare Pro­bi­otics, as it eyes both a lo­cal and re­gion­al busi­ness ex­pan­sion.

Founder of the brand, Do­minique Himiob, ex­plained the busi­ness, which had been ini­tial­ly born out of her own search and de­vel­op­ment of a home­made rem­e­dy for ir­ri­ta­ble bow­el syn­drome (IBS), is about to piv­ot in­to a broad­er lifestyle brand by in­tro­duc­ing low­er-sug­ar, ready-to-drink op­tions on the lo­cal mar­ket. This is set to com­ple­ment the Sauer­kraut prod­uct al­so be­ing of­fered on the mar­ket.

“Pre­vi­ous­ly, we were sell­ing the prod­uct and mar­ket­ing it as a one-shot a day. So the new line con­sists of a prod­uct that you just drink the whole thing to get what you want from it. It’s more of a lifestyle brand. We’ve shift­ed our brand it­self in­to lifestyle brand. So the brand­ing is dif­fer­ent,” she said.

While re­cent head­lines con­cern­ing the in­crease in age re­quire­ment for the con­sump­tion of al­co­hol have prompt­ed dis­cus­sions in oth­er busi­ness sec­tors, the Amare founder had a far more op­ti­mistic out­look.

Himiob not­ed there was a glob­al trend that al­co­hol sales were down world­wide. This com­bined with grow­ing health-con­scious con­sumer trends which al­so en­cour­aged the ris­ing de­mand for non-al­co­holic al­ter­na­tives, has seen in­creased de­mand for the prod­uct, not just in Trinidad and To­ba­go but across the Caribbean.

She said, “Not on­ly for Trinidad but glob­al­ly, there is ac­tu­al­ly a mas­sive de­cline in al­co­hol sales, es­pe­cial­ly with the younger gen­er­a­tion. So the world is see­ing a lot of maybe 18- to 21-year-olds, even to 30, want­i­ng non-al­co­holic bev­er­ages. So that opens up a lot of doors for us to now tar­get mar­ket those cus­tomers who want to go out, who want to have a cool bot­tle in their hand, who want to drink some­thing cool and bub­bly, but they don’t want al­co­hol be­cause they’re start­ing to re­alise how much al­co­hol af­fects your health. So it’s a great time for the brand to have piv­ot­ed in­to the space, be­cause we know where the world is go­ing, and so we saw an op­por­tu­ni­ty, and that’s why I re­designed the prod­uct to now cater to more mar­ket.”

She ex­plained the brand was prepar­ing to en­ter the ex­port mar­ket with­in six months.

“The good thing for us is that a lot of these mar­kets don’t have these types of prod­ucts, and if they do, they are sell­ing what I was mak­ing 10 years ago. So for me, it’s some­thing re­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial be­cause the mar­ket is ready.

“The Caribbean wants to be healthy. They wants to im­prove their well­ness, but they don’t yet have ac­cess to these prod­ucts made lo­cal­ly in the Caribbean. So they have to spend their forex on bring­ing in prod­ucts that are from the US Where­as we have Caribbean-made, Trinida­di­an-made op­tions for them, and we have seen a lot of in­ter­est from sev­er­al of the near­by Caribbean is­lands that they want to start bring­ing in these prod­ucts,” she said.

Himiob, who would ini­tial­ly dri­ve to Ma­yaro for fresh co­conut wa­ter and to Cou­va for cane syrup, key in­gre­di­ents for the prod­uct, has con­tin­ued to large­ly de­pend on lo­cal raw ma­te­ri­als, de­spite ex­pand­ed pro­duc­tion to rough­ly 400 cas­es month­ly. Had­co start­ed tak­ing up dis­tri­b­u­tion of the prod­uct sev­en years ago, as the brand gained mo­men­tum in lo­cal su­per­mar­ket chains.

“We do buy some things abroad, but it’s not the ma­jor­i­ty of our im­ports. So it’s not at this time im­pact­ing us in a neg­a­tive way. But once we start to ex­port and we have that forex to work with, we can start pur­chas­ing and us­ing that forex to get low­er-cost raw ma­te­ri­als,” she ex­plained, adding that the com­pa­ny is still large­ly us­ing lo­cal prod­ucts but is hop­ing that the ex­pan­sion would al­so help gen­er­ate for­eign ex­change to fur­ther fund de­vel­op­ment.

The busi­ness did nav­i­gate oth­er eco­nom­ic chal­lenges in the lo­cal mar­ket, in­clud­ing mov­ing through four fa­cil­i­ties be­fore set­tling in­to its cur­rent brew­ery three years ago.

She ex­plained in 2023 she moved in­to the Di­a­mond Vale In­dus­tri­al Es­tate where Amare es­tab­lished the on­ly kom­bucha mi­cro­brew­ery op­er­at­ing in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean. The brew­ery’s pro­duc­tion is run by a small team of three, two of whom have stayed with the busi­ness since its in­cep­tion 11 years ago.

The busi­ness cur­rent­ly is gen­er­at­ing $2 mil­lion in an­nu­al rev­enue. Himiob said this de­vel­op­ment was be­yond her ex­pec­ta­tion when she start­ed the busi­ness.

She ex­plained she was teach­ing sci­ence lessons to gen­er­ate in­come when she ini­tial­ly of­fered con­sign­ment terms to a gro­cery to get Amare on store shelves and con­duct­ed in-store sam­pling ses­sions to ed­u­cate cu­ri­ous shop­pers about a prod­uct cat­e­go­ry they had nev­er seen.

Himiob ex­plained there are still mem­bers of the pub­lic learn­ing about the prod­ucts and its ben­e­fits.

She said the com­pa­ny is ac­tive­ly prepar­ing to ex­port its prod­ucts to neigh­bour­ing Caribbean is­lands and look­ing cap­ture new mar­ket seg­ments with­in cafes, gyms, and the broad­er hos­pi­tal­i­ty in­dus­try.

“There is a grow­ing de­mand in the food ser­vice space. I’m talk­ing cafes, ho­tels, you know the Hy­atts, all of these dif­fer­ent food ser­vice in­dus­tries that peo­ple want to start hav­ing non-al­co­holic op­tions avail­able to them when they go to restau­rants be­cause not every­body wants to drink al­co­hol.” she said.

“So that is kind of where we are fo­cus­ing, grow­ing at the mo­ment, the food ser­vice as well as gyms, pi­lates stu­dios, yo­ga stu­dios, try­ing to en­cour­age that peo­ple use our caf­feinat­ed kom­bucha. That prod­uct, caf­feinat­ed kom­bucha, is a source of en­er­gy, as a source of caf­feine, in­stead of maybe us­ing an­oth­er caf­feinat­ed bev­er­age.”

Himiob said she had been part of many part­ner­ships as re­sult of the surge in 5Ks, while she al­so had one eye on the Car­ni­val sea­son for fit­ness burnouts ahead of the main event.