Blodin Ukella is the founder and CEO of The Ryl Company, a cutting-edge beverage business that targets Gen-Z and Millennial customers and focuses on products that cater to indulgent and high velocity categories (such as iced tea) in a clean, functional and sustainable format. Their flagship ready-to-drink tea line is Ryl Tea.
According to Ukella, Ryl Tea underwent 19 different product iterations over a six month period until Ryl’s team successfully developed their RTD tea, which combines the indulgent and convenient attributes of legacy iced tea with the clean and functional attributes of made-at-home tea, via their proprietary Ryl Polyphenol Technology.
After securing a multi-million dollar round of funding in June 2022, Ryl Tea officially launched in January 2023 with a fast and strategic roll-out in Northeast key retail chains, such as Wegmans, Shoprite and Whole Foods Market.
In March 2023, Ryl Tea expanded nationwide at Sprouts Farmers Market, and the brand recently shared a big announcement about its newest major investor and brand ambassador, country music superstar Morgan Wallen, in April 2023.
Now, The Ryl Company is poised to become a trailblazer in functional tea, with tactical plans to expand the brand in key regions across the United States throughout the second half of 2023.
World Tea News chats with Ukella to learn more about The Ryl Company and Ryl Tea, the secrets behind their instant success (they’re one of the most searched tea queries right now), their partnership with Morgan Wallen and their proprietary Ryl Polyphenol Technology, among other topics.
Question: Hi, Blodin – Thanks for your time! First off, can you tell us a little bit about your background in the beverage industry?
Answer: My background in the beverage industry has been an extremely fortunate one. I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best brands and teams in the industry. My first experience in beverage was at a company called Bai, an antioxidant drink that sold to Dr Pepper Snapple Group in 2017. While at Bai, I was a data scientist, and that experience gave me a lot of visibility to DSD [direct store delivery] and taught me so much about the importance of creating an authentic brand culture; Bai’s leadership team did that better than anyone else, and it left a true mark on how I look at brand building today.
From Bai, I went to work at Halen Brands – a food and beverage incubator, very similar to a venture fund, that owned/operated several hyper growth CPG [consumer product goods] brands. My role at Halen was mostly spent focusing on OWYN, a plant-based protein drink that we purchased pre revenue and scaled over several years to become the No. 1 plant-based protein drink in America. If it weren’t for my time at OWYN, I would have never learned as much as I did about the “wellness enthusiast,” an emerging customer that is quickly gaining share in the U.S. At Ryl, we take a lot of the learnings that I was able to gain from OWYN and we put those winning strategies into play here, daily.
Question: How did The Ryl Company come about?
Answer: We launched Ryl in July 2022 and stayed under the radar for about 6 months before sharing our product with the industry in January. Those first couple of months behind the scenes were spent doing a lot of R&D on different teas, tea extracts, manufactures and suppliers. We wanted to ensure that we were using the highest quality ingredients and working with partners that were as passionate about tea and wellness beverages as we were.
In parallel, we worked diligently with our early-stage retail partners to “incubate” the brand behind the scenes. We went back and forth with those partners to vet out different brand designs, different product taste profiles, pricing, and a number of other relevant go-to market topics until we landed on what we were proud of sharing with the industry. As an entrepreneur, I was extremely lucky to have incredible investor partners that offered not just financial support in launching Ryl off the ground, but also business strategy support through active advisory in the pre revenue stage of the business.
Question: When did you first discover tea?
Answer: My discovery of tea stems all the way back to my childhood roots. In 1999, my family and I came to America as war refugees after being forced to escape our home in Kosovo. When we first came to the states, we relied on traditional Albanian health remedies and tea was at the top of that list in my household. We drank tea as often as most people drink coffee and relied on it as a health supplement as much as we did a delicious go to social-occasion drink. That’s where my love for tea was born. When I got older and started working in the beverage industry, I looked back at my childhood and realized that tea could do more than just taste good, it could do good for your body too, and I owe my families Albanian traditions for that realization.
Question: What do you love about tea?
Answer: This should be much easier to answer than it is, but the reality is that I love tea for so many different reasons. Here’s the most important one: Tea leaves offer more than just taste and flavor. I am a huge advocate of consuming natural born products that can provide different types of health benefits. The fact that tea has so much to offer, whether it be polyphenols, the l-theanine or other attributes, fires me up. It’s a product that offers more than just great taste, whereas, so many products in the beverage industry today forget the importance of offering more than just taste in their products. Tea gives you the best of both worlds: great flavor and great benefits.
Question: What can you tell us about The Ryl Company’s ready-to-drink (RTD) tea line that launched in January?
Answer: Ryl Tea is a zero sugar, perfectly sweetened iced tea that contains no artificial ingredients and is super powered with our Ryl Polyphenol Technology. We package each Ryl Tea can in a 100 percent recyclable 16-ounce aluminum can. Our teas truly are the “real” package of what tea is meant to embody. Instead of only offering the delicious and convenient characteristics of a traditional RTD iced tea, we deliver the functional attributes that natural tea leaves have to offer. We are on a mission to bring “delicious” and “healthy” together for the first time, because tasting good and being good for you, belong in the same equation.
Question: The Ryl Company invented the proprietary “Ryl Polyphenol Technology.” Can you explain what that means and the benefit to the consumer?
Answer: Ryl Polyphenol Technology is our proprietary process and formula that allow Ryl Tea to have a consistent 200 mg of tea polyphenols in every can. Why’s that important? Well, tea polyphenols are the functional compound that naturally come from tea leaves in the first place, but unfortunately most of the stuff that we drink in a RTD format doesn’t have a robust or consistent amount of them. That’s where our Ryl Polyphenol Technology comes in; we spent months working on a way to ensure that our teas always had an industry leading level of polyphenols in them, consistently. Although we don’t make any direct claims to our consumers, we urge them to follow the research that several well accredited universities and institutions have done as it relates to the benefits of consuming tea polyphenols in general.
If you’re new to them, polyphenols act a lot like antioxidants to your body, and based on third party research, they have shown to help reduce overall free radical load in our bodies, which has shown to help reduce likelihood of oxidative stress; a process that has been shown to lead to different forms of long-term chronic illnesses like cardiovascular disease. We wanted to create a product that made sure the good stuff that tea leaves offer naturally actually made it to the finished products in the RTD side of the tea industry, and our technology is what helps us achieve that.
Question: Functional foods and beverages has been a big trend over the last several years. Do you think that trend will continue?
Answer: For sure, the “better-for-you” era is evolving in front of our eyes. If you think back to the early or middle 2010s, better for you was used to describe products that pioneered the use of natural sweeteners or products that used food certification claims like organic or non-GMO. Now, being nothing artificial and having claims is just a check box, consumers are looking for more out of everything they consume. To me, the functional era is just getting started.
Question: You recently announced a partnership with country music star Morgan Wallen, who’s an investor and brand ambassador of The Ryl Company. How did the partnership come about and is it helping The Ryl Company reach a larger audience?
Answer: The partnership with Morgan came about very organically. We met through a mutual friend who was based out of Nashville, Tenn. After we got to know Morgan and his team at Big Loud, we knew they were the perfect people to partner with. Being that Morgan is from Eastern Tenn., he already had a passion for tea, and sweet tea specifically, because he grew up drinking it all the time. When we told him we had the same great taste as the stuff that he grew up on, but ours didn’t have any sugar and was enriched with polyphenols, he felt aligned with our mission of bringing people the great taste of iced tea in an unguilty format. The partnership with Morgan has been a huge blessing for the brand, it's given us a multimillion-person audience to communicate to and has grown our personal brand following quickly.
Question: What’s your best-selling tea right now and why?
Answer: Our best-selling tea all depends on geography. Here in the Northeast, our Peach Tea is our top seller, but that’s because the roots of iced tea in the Northeast stem from one of the first major RTD brands signature Peach sku, thus consumers are conditioned to turn to Peach Tea. If you look at our data in new retail chains across the South, our Ryl Sweet Tea is leading the charge. The south loves Sweet Tea, so it attracts customers to the product as they scan through retail shelves for something new.
Question: How important is sustainability and the environment to The Ryl Company, and what are you doing in this area?
Answer: Sustainability and the environment are extremely important to our team at Ryl. When we first started the brand, our ops leaders and I sat down and weighed the pros and cons to launching in a plastic vs aluminum format. As businesspeople, a lot of the pros at that time indicated that plastic would lead to a better financial outcome for a brand-new company, but it broke our core principles toward building a business focused on positively impacting our generations to come. We asked ourselves: What good is a brand that does good for your body but not for the environment. That’s why we immediately pivoted and focused on launching in a 100-percent recyclable aluminum can format and we’ve never looked back since.
Question: What excites you about the overall North American tea market right now?
Answer: Everything. That’s the short answer. The North American tea market is a huge market to play in, in the states alone there is well over $6 billion in RTD tea category share and what’s most exciting is that so much of the category is still reliant on legacy trends. You see a lot more teas in the market that still use sugar or artificial ingredients than you do clean and functional ones. That excites our team because we don’t want to be the next iced tea, we want to be the first functional tea that meets the taste buds of the masses. Plus, in a big category like this one, there is plenty of competitive action, I think that’s good for a category, and good for a startup brand. Competition creates action and that action is a good thing for the category.
Question: Why do you think RTD tea is on the rise, becoming more popular with consumers?
Answer: In my opinion, RTD everything is on the rise right now and that’s because convenience is becoming more of a focus point for customers than ever. People don’t want to spend the same time they used to on different daily tasks and preparing their daily drinks is one of them. Not just that though, I think caffeine intake is an important thing to a lot of customers in the market right now and with the rise of the energy category, I think people who are looking for naturally caffeinated or less caffeinated options are turning to categories like tea.
Question: What tea industry trends or beverage trends are you paying attention to right now?
Answer: By far the most important trend that I am paying attention to right now is the shift into functional and/or clean focus. I’m a big believer that “better-for-you” is evolving and that what used to be considered “good enough” is just “standard” these days. Consumers seem to be focused on getting more out of everything they consume and instead of simply being “better-for-you.” I see trends evolving into “does-better-for-you”. In tea, we believe we are one of the few brands pioneering that shift in mentality, we want our products to not only deliver on industry leading tea taste, but we want them to deliver on industry leading tea function, too.
Question: What do you think is the most important tea industry issue and why?
Answer: The most important tea industry issue today is brand marketing. There is so many products in the tea category that position themselves as healthful by leaning on the general tea angle of their products but at the same time, so many of these products are filled with ingredients that aren’t good for you. Sugar still plays a huge role in this category and brands that use sugar in a large level still lean on their “tea angle” to portray themselves as a better for you option.
Question: How is The Ryl Company focusing on attracting the next generation of tea drinkers?
Answer: My team and I believe that the best way to focus on attracting the next generation of tea drinkers is to figure out who the consumers are that aren’t currently shopping the set today. It would be easy to create a copycat product that competes head-to-head directly for market share within the RTD tea category today, but it’s also counter intuitive to the idea of innovation and category growth.
We are more focused on identifying what consumers are staying away from the tea set all together and why, and creating products that meet their needs. Fortunately for our team at Ryl, being a “real” full tea proposition is the answer to that question, because we believe that the next generation of tea drinkers are the educated wellness consumers who are focused on knowing that they are getting exactly what they are being told they are getting. Ryl Tea is that product, we not only deliver on the nostalgic taste of a refreshingly, sweet, iced tea, but we do it while delivering 200mg of tea polyphenols, and do it in a consistent, transparent way that helps the next generation of wellness enthusiasts to trust our brand.
Question: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced when you launched your ready-to-drink tea business – and do you have any advice for tea entrepreneurs and those just starting out?
Answer: The challenges that my team and I have faced when building Ryl thus far don’t feel as specific to tea as they do to being an entrepreneur or startup brand in general. Being the small fish in a large fish tank – like the $6 billion RTD tea category [in the U.S.] – is never easy, you are going to face product sourcing and production challenges when competing for ingredients or production time against larger brands, and you are going to face shelf space challenges as a smaller player who is competing against big brands that have significant marketing and product roll out budgets. We faced all of those, but the greatest advice I can give to anyone starting out is to have relentless grit and do it with a firm moral compass. Don’t stop pushing for what you are looking to achieve but do it while being good to everyone around you.
Question: The Ryl Company has received a lot of attention in the press this year, and Ryl Tea is one of the most searched tea businesses on Google over the last 90 days. What’s the secret to this success?
Answer: The three keys to awareness success for us were: (1) a great team of people, (2) a product that justifies the attention, and (3) a great awareness driving partner. Our team has worked tremendously hard to ensure that they are as active with our rapidly growing community as possible, and our marketing team and partners have done a phenomenal job portraying the brand in the right way to our consumers. If you can do that everyday and combine it with a really good product that people enjoy drinking daily, you can drive your awareness funnel quickly. Then, you layer a great partner who has an audience that resonates with the brand and the rest is history. We feel extremely lucky to have the people we do, to have the product we have, and to have the awareness driving partners with us for the ride.
Question: What are some of the major retailers that currently carry Ryl Tea?
Answer: We have partnered with some of the best and biggest retailers across America. After launching in January of this year, we started our retail journey in the Northeast, where we partnered with several chains in the region including Wegmans, Whole Foods Market and ShopRite.
After about three months of staying focused in the Northeast, we expanded our footprint nationwide with a major natural channel retailer, Sprouts Farmers Market.
Then, in late May, we announced that we would be heading into several new chains across different strategic regions throughout the US, starting with Harris Teeter in North Carolina/South Carolina, Brookshire Grocers in Northern Texas/Louisiana, and Reasors in Oklahoma. Later this year, starting in July, we will be launching with Kroger, a major conventional grocery chain with over 2,000 doors across the United States.
Question: Thanks for your time! Last question – what do you want the tea community to remember about The Ryl Company and Ryl Tea?
Answer: I love this question because it truly is the whole reason we launched Ryl: We want people to remember that Ryl Tea was one of the first brands to really focus on bringing the naturally occurring functional benefits of our products core ingredients to life, without sacrificing the taste expectations that a notoriously “delicious & indulgent” category like iced tea is known to deliver.
Ryl Tea wants to prove that healthy and delicious can play together and that you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. We are hoping to pioneer the “Additive Revolution” and challenge beverage entrepreneurs to think from the lense of “being incremental and additive” versus “being disruptive.”
To learn more about The Ryl Company, visit DrinkRyl.com.
Don’t Miss the Weekly World Tea News eNewsletter! Get your free subscription, if you’re not already subscribed, by clicking here.
Plan to Attend or Participate in World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024
To learn about other key developments, trends, issues, hot topics and products within the global tea community, plan to attend World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024 in Las Vegas, co-located with Bar & Restaurant Expo. Visit WorldTeaExpo.com.
To book your sponsorship or exhibit space at the World Tea Conference + Expo, or to enquire about advertising and sponsorship opportunities at World Tea News, contact:
Ellainy Karaboitis-Christopoulos
Business Development Manager, Questex
Phone: +1-212-895-8493
Email: [email protected]
Also, be sure to stay connected with World Tea Expo on social media for details and insights about the event. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.