A Brand-New Brand (Germany/Europe)

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Made much like beer, but without alcohol, Bionade is a fizzy, fruity hit in Germany. But can it go global?

Ostheim In Der Rhoen is a quiet German town in northern Bavaria. Picture-book pretty, with narrow, winding streets, it does not look like a place where anything – let alone anything hip – ever happens. But this hamlet is the birthplace of Bionade, an all-natural soft drink that has become a national sensation (it more than tripled sales last year), one that its creators now hope to take world-wide.

Bionade’s founders do not dream of global conquest for its own sake. They speak passionately about what they describe as the drink’s deeper meaning. ‘Bionade is a totally idealistic product. Of course we want to make money, but honestly, this was an attempt to give people something better’, says Bionade’s CEO, Peter Kowalsky, 38.

It was the shake-up of the German beer industry in the 1980’s that inspired Bionade’s inventor, Dieter Leipold, then master brewer to quest for a new quaff. With younger German consumers increasingly choosing imports such as Corona and Miller Lite over local beers, Leipold worried about the brewery’s future. And there was more at stake than just business: it was family. He lived with the brewery’s present owner, Sigrid Peter, now his wife, and acted as stepfather to her sons, Peter and Stephen Kowalsky.

Knowing he could not compete with the beer conglomerates, he began to tinker with an idea: invent a healthy soft drink using beer brewing principles. One of the goals was to make a drink for children that did not have any artificial additives and that followed the purity requirements traditionally used to make beer. That meant a product with natural ingredients only: malt, water, sugar, fruit essences. No corn syrup, nothing artificial. And the same fermentation process