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One of Australia's biggest producers of the soft drink kombucha is calling for greater market regulation because some beverages are failing to meet consumer expectations as a health food.
Jeff Low produces up to 5 million bottles a year under contract and for his own labels from a brewery and bottling plant in Tea Gardens on the mid north coast of New South Wales.
After investing $1 million in his business in 2013, he said he developed a "long aged" kombucha process, which produced a sugar-free drink high in probiotic enzymes and with less than 0.2 per cent alcohol.
He said there were products now being sold in Australia with wildly inconsistent alcohol levels or which were pasteurised so they did not have naturally occurring enzymes.
Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) said kombucha was a traditional food and did not need any special assessment required for so-called novel foods. The national maximum alcohol level for the drink was set at 1.5 per cent.
A FSANZ spokesperson said standards compliance was a matter for state health authorities.
Mr Low said he believed products should be taken from shelves for random testing.
"[They need] testing for alcohol, testing for probiotic, making sure it's still alive, that it is a living product and it's not pasteurised," Mr Low said.
"We don't pasteurise here, there is no element of pasteurisation in what we do. We do brew tea at 85 degrees to make sure there's no contamination, to make sure that everything has been killed on the way through the process.
"I would be looking for alcohol first up and probiotic count to make sure that it is real kombucha. I believe there's a lot of people out there at the moment who are adding at the end of the process the probiotic and it's not a kombucha probiotic. It's no longer kombucha."
In the US, kombucha is one of the fastest growing beverage categories, with 30 per cent growth a year, but there is confusion about the definition of the product and what claims are appropriate in relation to probiotic content.
Three lawsuits have been launched against prominent producers over labelling and advertising.
Last October, a suit was filed in the California Superior Court against global giant PepsiCo over its probiotic beverage brand KeVita, alleging it deceived consumers because its kombucha products were pasteurised. This killed any naturally occurring bacteria, which violated consumer expectations of a raw product, the complaint said.
In Australia, a leading gut health expert said there was a need for hard scientific evidence on health benefit claims made about kombucha.
CSIRO scientist Dr Michael Conlon said research done so far involved animal trials.
"There hasn't been any rigorous work done in humans to date," Dr Conlon said.
"The animal studies and there have been quite a few of them, suggest a range of different effects. People have looked at things like the effect on the immune system, the ability to reduce cholesterol, the ability to change micronutrient levels and the ability to reduce oxidant levels using antioxidants that might be present in the kombucha."
At Margaret River in WA, former AFL footballer turned winemaker Trent Carroll developed a home brew hobby into a commercial product and now sells about 3,000 cases a month.
He said kombucha helped him deal with chronic inflammation and injuries from his nine-year career playing for the West Coast Eagles and the Fremantle Dockers.
He believed it was only a matter of time before scientific evidence supported kombucha's health benefits.
"There's a lot of research now on the anti-inflammatory effect of vinegar, kombucha basically is a vinegar ferment," Mr Carroll said.
"There's a plethora of information about the health benefits of antioxidants and the benefits of drinking tea, kombucha is a fermented tea and we all know the horrors of sugar and kombucha as a well-made beverage is very low sugar."
Mr Carroll said his traditional live brew required refrigeration to keep its probiotic count and alcohol levels stable. He was sceptical about some products on the market and supported greater scrutiny.
"We're trying to brew exactly what we would have on the kitchen bench at home in the market and we don't think that for the reasons of shelf stability or ease of distribution we should be compromising what I feel authentic kombucha should be," Mr Carroll said.
"We're hanging in there with the way we're producing and yeah I guess it's up to the end consumer to research and look into what they're producing but I guess at the end of the day any kombucha is a better swap out for a sugary soft drink."
Watch this story on Landline at 12:30pm Sunday.
Topics: food-and-beverage, food-safety, lifestyle-and-leisure, food-processing, margaret-river-6285, wa, australia, tea-gardens-2324
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