Page 10 - Food & Drink Magazine April 2020

✷ RISING STAR
Owning the night
From a local custom to a business opportunity, Bae Juice is bringing wellness to the liquor store. Doris Prodanovic speaks with Bae Juice co-founder Liam Gostencnik to find out how.
THE health and wellness trend has become a core element in today’s food and beverage consumption. Not only are consumers asking how a product can benefit them, but behavioural shifts such as plant-based eating and monitoring alcohol consumption are front of mind more than ever.
For the three-piece team at Bae Juice, it is all about “wellness after badness” with their hangover remedy, backed not only by science, but distributors, including Dan Murphy’s, Deliveroo
and FoodWorks.
Tim O’Sullivan, Sumin Do and Liam Gostencnik started Bae Juice in May 2019 with less than $5000 between them and a
goal to provide a hangover remedy in easy, accessible 120 millilitre packs. The remedy is simple – 100 per cent Korean pear juice.
While travelling in South Korea, O’Sullivan discovered that consuming pear juice before a night out was a common, habitual practice minimising the effects of a hangover. The team saw the opportunity to bring the remedy back to Australia, and took the Korean word for pear, bae, for the product’s namesake.
“We gave it a Google and found there was a CSIRO report listing fourteen symptoms of a hangover and those who drank Korean pear juice in the test had a reduced severity of those symptoms,” Gostencnik says.
He told Food & Drink Business: “Korean pear has an enzyme that speeds up the metabolism and detoxification of alcohol in the body. Our product is a natural juice with no added sugars and fits perfectly into the wellness trend that’s booming at the moment, similar to how kombucha has.”
CSIRO’s Review on the Health Benefits and Nutritional Properties of Pear report found the key component with the potential to “stimulate alcohol metabolism” is the phenolic acid Arbutin, which has a high concentration in the skin of Korean pear. It can decrease blood alcohol levels, as well as symptoms such as headache, fatigue, dizziness and poor concentration.
10 | Food&Drink business | April 2020 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au