GT Dave's stake in GT’s Living Foods, plus homes in Beverly Hills, 8 acres in Kauai and a growing contemporary art collection, makes him a billionaire. Meet 6 other beverage founders in the Three Comma Club: by chloesorvino
efore entering his kingdom, George Thomas Dave dons his crown—a blue hairnet pulled over a fashionably short buzz cut. He pushes open the doors of his year-old factory, releasing a gust of cold air and the scent of vinegar. The interior is all steel and fluorescence, light glinting off Dave’s diamond-sheathed Rolex, the metallic studs on his dress shoes and the platinum rings on his forefinger, ring finger and little finger.
“He has been able to scale his company while retaining his craft ethos and independent spirit,” says Greg Steltenpohl, an admirer of Dave’s and a founder of the Odwalla juice company. Steltenpohl knows what it’s like to give up independence, chafing at the chains wrapped around him by public shareholders after Odwalla’s 1993 IPO. He long ago left Odwalla and. Dave has “the freedom to still be 100% himself,” Steltenpohl says.
His perspective changed the next year when his mother, Laraine, received a sudden cancer diagnosis. He recalls the grim time in their lives unfolding like this: Laraine’s initial prognosis was bad, a growing golf-ball-size tumor in her breast. Doctors scheduled a bone marrow transplant before additional tests came back. When the doctors finally got them, they were astonished. Despite their initial guess, the tumor was years old but dormant.
“I was a one-man show. I brewed, bottled, delivered, labeled—you name it,” Dave says. “This product was something really special and something that very much had aspects of me in it, and I wanted to protect it.” At first, Whole Foods hesitated to return to kombucha. Honest Tea threw up its hands completely and stopped making it. Many more of GT’s competitors began pasteurizing to control alcohol levels and quickly won back spots at Whole Foods. But the grocer was still reluctant to restock GT’s. Dave was adamant that he wouldn’t pasteurize, believing it would zap away some of the alleged health benefits. He spent months tinkering with his recipe and came up with a new line called Enlightened.
Dave doesn’t walk the show floor anymore. It depresses him too much, he says, to see his rivals’ ill-conceived kombuchas and how they’re damaging customers’ appreciation for more authentic ones like his. But the competition below him is hungry to take a piece of his long-established position in the industry. “Kombucha is growing at 40% a year.
As for Health-Ade, Dave is stewing about the price war it has ignited with him. Health-Ade has raised $30 million from Coke and other investors, according to PitchBook, and it has used that money to build a factory, allowing it to keep its manufacturing costs and pricing low. “Right now, you can go and buy a Health-Ade for 99 cents because they offer a coupon here and a coupon there, and you can stack the coupons. That’s killing the category.
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