IKEA seeks to cut costs and make populist furniture, most famously perhaps for selling their items disassembled for their customers to finish putting together at home, preferably with the aid of Tylenol and bourbon.
It’s a hybrid-DIY solution that balances its customers’ range of handiness with cold, Scandinavian efficiency. With the help of Danish design firm Everland and beverage maker Læsk, IKEA is bringing that same hybrid-DIY spirit to a new kombucha drink consumers take home to make themselves.
Kombucha, for the uninitiated, is a fermented tea drink created by adding cultures to sweetened tea, many believe that consuming the beverage has positive health benefits, for others, it’s a low-alcohol alternative, with most varieties having less than 0.5% alcohol by volume.
Brewing kombucha at home is massively popular, and IKEA is debuting their own kit, making the process as easy as putting together a handful of ingredients and letting the micro critters do their thing. While IKEA is no stranger to selling ready-to-drink beverages, this is the first homebrew kit for the home goods maker and retailer.
Læsk’s kit simplified the kombucha home brewing process by putting together nearly all the ingredients and containers required to brew and then store the beverage. Since it’s easy as “one, two, three” the tag line is “How to Kombucha!? One + Two + Three = Success!”
Everland designed the labels on the products to be light-hearted and playful, with the colors tied to the brewing process and ingredients. The tea label colors correspond to the kinds of tea, Chamomile + Rose tea carries pink, Cocoa + Spearmint sports minty green and Hibiscus + Lemongrass wears a reddish label. All three are numbered “1,” as in the first step in the kombucha brew, and punctuated by a single thumbs up.
The jar where the science gets down and funky is labeled “no. 2” and sports a hand crossing two fingers, maybe projecting the apprehensions of the kombucha homebrewer’s initial foray into fermented beverage making?
The last requisite ingredient, the kombucha culture, is contained in an aluminum can with a yellow label, a color reminiscent of the fermented end product and culture, and, as you’d expect, is labeled “no. 3” with a hand holding three fingers in an OK sign, which in this case is meant to assure the consumer they’re good to go.
A flip-top glass bottle, meant to house the finished product which takes about a week to brew, has a hand waving “Hi.”
Læsk x IKEA’s DIY kombucha will premiere in Prague, Czech Republic before being released in the rest of the world.
