American kava cultivar begins its journey HAVE YOUR SAY
THE American Kava Growers’ Group, a group of American pioneers in the introduction of kava or yaqona in America, last week unveiled their success in harvesting and preparing their first concoction from their very own American kava cultivar. Known by its trademarked name “Kalikava”, the new American kava cultivar was selected in Hawaii and carefully bred in the American mainland for the American kava drinking market. American businessmen and kava bar owners Tyler Blythe, Matt Masifilo and Jeffrey Bowman, who make up the American Kava Growers’ Group, have big plans for their new American kava variety. Mr Blythe grows “kalikava” in Sacramento, California while Mr Masifilo and Mr Bowman grow theirs in Sarasota and Boca Raton, Florida respectively. contacted the group on their Facebook page American Kava Culture and spoke to them about their achievement.
FT: There’s another American kava group called American Kava Coalition. Are you also members of that?
Tyler: Individually we’re members of the Kava Coalition, but the American Kava Growers’ Group is not a member. We’re a collective.
FT: As you wrote in your Facebook post, this is the first kava successfully grown and harvested in America. Does it taste anything like Pacific kava?
Tyler: There’s definitely difference between Pacific cultivars and American cultivars. The American cultivars that we have here come from the Pacific, they came originally from Hawaii, but they’ve been grown here for 33 iterations. So, in the same way that Pacific people are taking kava from, say, Tonga and grown it in Fiji and selected for positive traits that Fijians like, Americans have taken Pacific kava grown in Hawaii and we’ve selected for certain traits and characteristics that we find desirable. So it’s gone through the same kind of human selection and adaptation process that Pacific kava has.
Matt: This is just the nursery. Before we put it in ground, we have our nursery pots. We’re simply continuing the voyage that Pacific people stopped. Pretty much once European contact happened, the people stopped voyaging and they stopped exploring for new lands because the outside world came to them. So we’re simply continuing the tradition that the people of the Pacific have done for thousands of years. We’re just picking up where they left off.
FT: Now that you have successfully grown an American cultivar, what’s the plan moving forward for American kava?
Tyler: The plan for American kava is to grow some of our own kava, but what we’re doing actually grows the entire market for kava. And so, the Pacific will benefit from this as well because we’re making the pie larger. We’re giving the people other options and it’s up to the free market to decide what they would like to drink and what they find desirable. But at the end of the day, we may grow the pie 10 times larger for kava and we’ll get, say, 20 per cent of that and the Pacific gets the other 80 per cent in terms of benefit. So, in marketing American kava, we’re actually marketing kava.
Matt: It’s not only about growing the pie, but also increasing awareness. When it’s just a drink, people only see us marketing or at kava bars, but when you have actual farms where the American
consumer can physically see miles and miles of kava plantations growing, just like oranges grow here and strawberries…and when that becomes a thing here, it just exposes kava to 10 times more people and that just grows the market for everyone.
FT: I know people in the Pacific would be very concerned about this because kava has never been associated with any other place outside of the region.
Tyler: Of course. But they also have to understand that the pie grows and that they will receive the majority of the benefits from this. If Americans are going to sell kava for $US150($F336) a kilo, there’s a special market for that, not everybody is going to buy that and at the end of the day, the Pacific will benefit the most. Imagine all of the Pacific people that now live in the United States – around three million? There are more Hawaiians that live on mainland than in Hawaii. Imagine all of these generations of people who are not going to be able to pass on the knowledge of how to grow kava, how to cultivate it, how to select for certain characteristics, they’ll never have that relationship with the plant that you have back home in
Tonga or Samoa or Fiji. Imagine that after one generation, that’s lost forever. Three thousand years of heritage and culture is lost and you don’t recover that unless you go back to the islands.
There’s an exodus of people from the islands and not a bunch of people coming back. So by allowing Pacific islanders to grow kava in America, it’s kind of bridging that cultural knowledge gap between generations.
Someone is going to be able to teach their son or daughter how to grow kava whereas that would not have been possible in America before this point.
Matt: It’s roots in the ground, so, when you have roots in the ground, it becomes permanent and that’s what we’re doing here. It’s when you have physical kava roots in the ground on US soil, that makes kava a permanent thing, a permanent market and not just a symbol trend for the decade where it’s just the health drink of the early 2020s. It becomes part of the American culture, just like coffee or tea. FT: How are you selling kava there, as a drink or nutraceuticals too?
Tyler: Right now we’re selling all that we can grow to kava bars in the raw form, in fresh, frozen green kava. So we don’t have any way of putting that into value added products because we’re selling out as much as we can harvest, it’s already pre-sold. People are already putting in pre-orders for kava six months out. We’re selling at $US150 ($F336) a kilo dry, but for frozen green kava, it’s $US45 ($F100) a pound.
Matt: Compare what we’re doing to new world wine versus old world wine. Old world wine was barely on par. America didn’t have a wine culture.
The wine consumption in America was not significantly high until they started growing wine in California and the first 100 years there was a lot of pushback, but over time it grew the market and everyone benefited from it and I think that’s the thing to ease pushy people in Fiji.
It’s the fear of the unknown is really what it is.
But Fiji will always be Fiji. You can’t ever take away Fiji kava because the environment of Fiji kava... just like you can’t ever take away Tonga kava and also you can’t replicate American kava in Fiji.
We can send you the plant and it will be different. And it’s the same with wine and coffee and everything organic. Having the support of Fiji would be great because there’s also a new market opportunity too, such as kava farming consultants.
The kava farmers barely make money with their hands, their sweat and their labour but this is opening a whole new market where they can make money with their brain and that’s adding value to the Fijian economy because now, the hardworking blue collar farmers will have an opportunity to make white collar office type consulting money and that creates a whole new market for the kava industry that didn’t exist before American Kava Growers started farming in America.
Tyler: I agree with Matt. Imagine in Fiji, the average kava farmer will make $20 a day doing hard work in the fields harvesting kava. We’re going to be paying $20 an hour for anybody that wants to come out here and dig kava. FT: You have a group of Pacific farmers there? Tyler: We’re soliciting for Pacific workers. And so we’re working right now with labour boards and state governments to immigrate Pacific farmers.
Matt: I think we do have the Fiji trade commission coming to visit us in May.
It’s when you have physical kava roots in the ground on US soil, that makes kava a permanent thing, a permanent market and not just a symbol trend for the decade
– Matt Masifilo
FT: So you’ll have a group of small holder farmers from the Pacific who will plant kava to supply your operation? Or how does it work?
Tyler: This is what we’re planning. Right now we have contract growers much in the same way that, say, Vanuatu or Fiji does where you have contract growers that grow enough for themselves and the excess they’ll sell to us. But in the future, we want to be inclusive of Pacific people and we’re offering anybody that wants to come out and grow with us to come on out. FT: So we’re looking at another exodus of people now due to your request for people to come and grow kava for you… Matt: It’s not just the physical presence; it’s also consulting as well. That can be done from Fiji via technology where it’s paying for information essentially. FT: How many hectares of kava do you have there now? Tyler: It’s difficult to estimate but at the moment we have about, I would say 4000 plants in the ground between our small collective. But we’d like to expand that significantly with some more contract growers, so it’s in its infancy.
The main part was making cultivars and selecting for traits that are going to survive in very different soils and very different conditions so we’ll begin growing our operation quite a bit.
Matt: We have about $US10m ($F22.42m) invested in this so far and opportunity for future buying as we scale, so the seed money is $US10m ($F22.42m) for the operation but as we hit benchmark in the scaling, there is the opportunity for contract farming for it. This is also a hedge for climate change.
You guys are dealing with climate change right there.
The thing is North are getting warmer, so as far as hedging national GDP of kava exports, Tonga actually leased farm in the 1990s in Hawaii because of this situation. They farmed their crops in Hawaii.
This is also a potential thing that we could do because we have the land for, say, climate issue if you have the explosion in Tonga, like last year. And that could happen again and cause mass die-off (of kava crops).
So with climate change like that, this is where farming kava in America is really the insurance for the entire industry overall. We can do contract farming for entire countries, especially for, say Tonga, who is not even five per cent in land mass.
So we can contract farm for them just like Hawaii was attempting to do in Oahu three kings ago.
King Tupou IV leased land in Hawaii to plant kava and other cash crops for the country. So it presents the opportunity for the climate change that you’re facing and insures the market really.
Tyler: If you have another cyclone or another volcanic eruption and there’s any interruption in the supply chain, markets die very quickly and it’s very hard to rebound those markets. You have another COVID event when you don’t have shipping coming around to Fiji or Vanuatu, if all the kava bars here close because they can’t get supply, it’s very hard to re-open.
So it’s like Matt said, it’s a hedge against any number of unforeseen things and foreseen things in the future.
There are things that you can’t see and there are things that you can probably foresee quite well, and I think Matt hit it on the head with things like climate change, rising sea levels, you know, the carbon emissions it takes to ship something 10,000 miles away….so there are a lot of intangible benefits for the islands as well.
Matt: And another things to add to it is the curiosity of people for tourism. Even though kava generates a huge amount for the country,
nothing compares to the American traveler so when you have people visiting farms in America, it only peaks their curiosity of going back to the source. So we’re building bridges to the Pacific through kava. It’s what the American Kava Growers are doing. FT: What sort of improvements have you made to your American cultivar compared to its Pacific cousins? And what’s the interest in kava like there?
Tyler: American kava is disease resistant, it doesn’t get cucumber mosaic virus, it doesn’t have pest issues and it’s very resilient.
In Florida we get 33,00 hours of sunshine a year versus maybe 22,00 or 24,00 (in the Pacific), so we get considerable more sunshine which means if we can grow kava in two and a half years, it’s more like a four year crop, just because we have more sun for it to grow.
Because we have more sun, we have less pests because the UV rays of the sun fry the insects much better. Matt: Our other friend Jeff (Jeffrey Bowman) who is not in this call, he started the first kava bar in the country, so as far as growing the market, he was on the front line for a very long time.
Tyler: Jeff started the very first kava bar in 2001 and now in 2024 we have over 400 kava bars. We have over 10 million kava drinkers and that makes America the largest kava-drinking culture population wise.
And we’re also the most diverse kava drinking culture because America is full of all different types of people. It’s only natural with three million Pacific islanders that kava follows the migration of the people.
It’s like in Fiji – the one that Lami Kava has is a coffee shop. And the one we’re talking about is a coffee shop and then they sell their kava at the coffee shop.
So if you take that concept and put it in America, there is over 20,000-plus, probably more, closer to 100,000 coffee shops in America.
You take the concept in Fiji and fix that up over here, the ability is there for the demand to go from stagnant to the moon overnight in America, because the coconut wireless travels very fast over here.
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