South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Native Florida yaupon ‘tea’ sprouts into $1 million business
A former Volusia County beach cop who forages for his crop through woods and his partners have turned leaves once used by Native Americans in medicine and ceremonies into a big business for caffeine-craving customers.
Yaupon Brothers American Tea Company went through about 9,000 pounds of yaupon holly leaves last year and did just shy of $1 million in revenue, growing about 70% each year since 2019, said CEO and co-founder Bryon White.
Yaupon Brothers this month opened a café as part of its new 7,000-square-foot production facility at 504 Pullman Road in Edgewater, a city near New Smyrna Beach. The old space was 900 square feet, and there is land at the new property to build more room as needed.
Foxtail Coffee Co. started serving its offerings in 2019. White said his yaupon tea also is carried at Whole Foods.
The business, which started in 2015, got most of its yaupon leaves last year from wild plants harvested on 90 acres in Volusia County, but White expects in the next two years most will come from farms. His company planted 70,000 yaupon trees last year.
“The demand is reaching a point to where farmers are starting to come to us,” White said. “We’re in a transition phase between wild harvesting and traditional agriculture.”
Yaupon is the only native North American plant that contains caffeine, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Yaupon for so long, so many thousands of years, was at the cornerstone of indigenous civilization,” said White, a former captain with Volusia County
Beach Safety. “It’s sort of yaupon coming back to its rightful place. We call it America’s first cup.”
Native Americans in the Southeast roasted the plants’ leaves and shoots to create a tea-like drink called “black drink,” a USDA plant fact sheet said. The agency warns eating its berries causes nausea and vomiting.
Yaupon tea tastes like green tea, but without the residual bitterness, said Brian Pearson, an assistant professor in the environmental horticulture department at the University of Florida.
He has tried Yaupon Brothers tea and has made tea from yaupon grown at the UF/IFAS Mid-Florida Research & Education Center in Apopka.
“With yaupon, since it wasn’t bitter, I didn’t feel the need to put sugar in it,” Pearson said.
The plant’s uninviting scientific name is Ilex vomitoria, and Native Americans drank yaupon socially as well as in ceremonies and medicinally to cause vomiting, according to the USDA.
“Certainly the tea itself is not the source of [the vomiting],” Pearson said.
Yaupon Brothers’ new space in Edgewater will also add two new tea bagging machines, one of which can do 120 bags a minute, for a total of six machines.
“We can do five times more production than we could before,” White said.
The café, open 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends, serves yaupon tea as well as coffee, pastries and pre-made sandwiches and snacks. There is also a yaupon garden.
The hope is the café will eventually serve beer and wine. Yaupon Brothers already partners with Playalinda Brewing Company in Titusville on a yaupon beer.
Pearson said because the plant is indigenous to Florida it has evolved to this climate, a farming advantage when compared with other crops like traditional tea, Camellia sinensis, which doesn’t grow naturally in the state.
”I think there’s a lot of potential there,” Pearson said.
There have been other changes in the business founded by White, his brother Kyle White and business partner Mark Steele.
The founders partnered with entrepreneur Oliver Luckett to create a new parent company called Ilex Organics in September, White said. They have since launched a new Mississippi brand called “Yazoo Yaupon” and started construction on a 38,000-square-foot facility in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Their business has 16 Florida employees and 12 in Mississippi, and should have 80 total employees by 2024, White said.
“I always looked at it as a new industry for Florida and the Southeast in general,” White said.