After lunch, nowit’s time for a drink

Date12 December 2020
Published date12 December 2020
After almost eight months of development through the various lockdowns, King’s non-alcoholic drinks firm was just a week away from launch when a multitude of issues reared their heads.

Sitting in a small central-Auckland meeting room, King talks of the two weeks leading up to the November 16 launch of AF (Alcohol Free).

“Doing this a second time, your own business, you definitely learn a lot of things from the first one,” King tells the Weekend Herald. “[But] it doesn’t take all of the challenges away.

“We’ve had huge challenges getting this product made, and actually four weeks ago I didn’t think we were going to launch. Everything that could go wrong, went wrong, but I think the second time round you just know how to manage those challenges a little bit better.”

The list of challenges was lengthy, says King.

“When we went to trial this at our bottler, the products started ‘flocking’ ... where all of these particles started gathering and so it looked like it had massive floaties in them, which is really unattractive and unappetising.

“We actually had a pink grapefruit [drink] that we were going to launch too, but because it was pink the floaties were fluoro pink.” That was one problem it had solved, as well as challenges getting the bottles from China, and issues with packaging wraps.

Near the start of the year, King had decided to stop drinking, planting the seed for her new venture.

She found going without alcohol surprisingly hard work — not for lack of willpower, but because of the social pressures. “It was actually quite difficult. Not so much in that I wanted to drink, but that people made it quite hard. If you go out and you say you’re not drinking, everyone is kind of like ‘Oh, what’s wrong? Are you pregnant?’ and I thought ‘gosh, in this day and age, we all know alcohol is not great for us, it is a carcinogenic — a toxin that we are putting in our bodies — to make people feel judged for not wanting to drink, I just thought that was such an odd view, and it really kind of emphasised in our culture how important drinking is.”

King says she struggled to find anything when she was on nights out beyond the usual options — water, juice or ginger beer — so she decided to make her own non-alcoholic drinks. “I felt like I needed something that was a bit more adult and complex and enjoyable and also sociable, because it’s not necessarily the liquid, but being part of that occasion.”

Formerly a gin and tonic drinker, she says she approached manufacturer and...

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