WORDS BY MELINDA HAMBRICK | PHOTOS BY PAT WARWICK
Blue draws bees, and if you’ve perused a natural foods store or specialty retailer looking for a cold, lightly carbonated beverage, your eye was probably caught by a distinctive blue bottle labeled Wild Tonic. If you examined it more closely, you might have noticed that it’s made in Arizona—Cottonwood, to be exact. The business started in Holly Skaggs’ kitchen in Sedona, but its foundation lies with family. “My grandmother was a fermenter,” Skaggs says. “We would pick dandelions and blueberries, and I would watch her ferment them and make wine. It’s something I grew up with, but when I was young, I didn’t understand it or the benefits. I just knew that we lived in Alaska, and that’s what we did to survive.”
Skaggs’ childhood connection with ferments took a backseat to her art career. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design—earning a degree in architecture—and went on to manage galleries in New York City and Seattle. In 2008, she started making her own artwork. “I was fascinated with beeswax—anything and everything to do with bees,” she says. “I started my art career as a painter of encaustic art, which is beeswax and damar pine resin. It’s a very ancient technique, dating back to the Egyptians.”
As she pursued her successful encaustic endeavors, the art of fermentation recaptured her attention. “It’s such an interesting thing. If you think about it, before refrigeration, fermentation was necessary to preserve the nutrients and the food itself. It’s been around forever, but it’s a forgotten art, much like encaustic was.”
In 2015, Skaggs went from sharing her special ferment with friends to selling it at farmers markets. “Jun is a rare cousin of kombucha. Because of its bright, effervescent flavor, it is considered the champagne within the category,” says Skaggs. “We use organic honey and green tea [as opposed to cane sugar and black tea], and they create this beautiful elixir of 42 different strains of beneficial bacteria and yeast. It’s two superfoods fermented together, and when you ferment anything, it makes the nutrients more available to the body.”
Amidst the kombucha craze, Wild Tonic was different. “Everybody who tried it wanted to figure out how they could get more. [The business] grew organically,” she says. From farmers markets in Sedona and Phoenix, to local restaurants, and then on to the shelves of stores like Natural Grocers and Whole Foods, the unique flavor and distinctive blue bottles generated a buzz. The artist and constant creator in Skaggs didn’t rest. Wild Tonic was the first to market with a hard jun. Sales were skyrocketing until Covid. The pandemic and personal circumstances almost left Wild Tonic hopelessly queenless.
“It’s like a nursery. We have to check and monitor them daily; they’re like children.”
— Holly Skaggs
Each SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) weighs about 200 pounds and is fed a steady supply of organic green tea and honey. The culture consumes much of the honey and produces organic acids, probiotics, and natural carbonation. The finished jun is then strained; flavored with fruit juices, herbs, and botanicals; and packaged for refrigeration or further conditioning.
Skaggs returned to the company five years ago. “For me, it’s about innovation, it’s about exploration, and it’s about bringing something with heart into the marketplace, not something that’s all about profit,” she says.“Our ingredients aren’t cheap, and it’s hard to be profitable, but I’d rather give people something real, that’s of quality.” Wild Tonic’s commitment to sourcing quality ingredients hasn’t changed, even at scale. “We do source all-organic. It’s important to me that we treat the Earth with respect and the bees with respect because that ultimately goes into people’s bodies. Yes, it costs more, but it’s the right thing to do,” she says.
Wild Tonic’s staff of ten brews and bottles 500–1,000 plus gallons of jun per day.
Although Wild Tonic has won numerous awards, Skaggs is remarkably humble and quick to credit her team. She is also honest about the effort involved. “It takes a lot of grit,” she says, “especially for women-owned beverage businesses. We get two percent of the capital that’s out there. It’s about the most difficult road you could go down.” Circumstances and setbacks have not deterred Skaggs or dampened the buzz: Costco buyers approached Wild Tonic and her debut in Prescott was scheduled for late July. “It’s taken us two and a half years to get through all of the paperwork, the food safety audits, the logistics, the packaging reviews,” she says,“but we did it.”
