Nutricom Food and Beverages Limited, producers of Kombucha energy drink have blamed storage conditions by retailers and consumers as the main reason of high alcohol content found in the drink.
Nutricom’s reaction follows The Nation’s story which established that despite labels on bottles of Kombucha or Kumbucha drinks displaying that they are non-alcoholic beverages, independent laboratory analyses found samples of the purported ‘health’ drinks with alcoholic contents as high as 8.0 percent.
However, the company labels on the bottles indicate that alcoholic contents are 0.005 percent.
“On the question of varying alcohol contents, we need to underline here that at the point of production, alcohol content in our product is 0.005 as indicated on the product sticker. However, due to varying storage conditions as the product goes to the market, which may result in the continuation of the fermentation process of the product – the alcohol content may slightly vary with what was at production. Needless to say, the Company has no control over how the product is stored once it leaves its factory premises,” reads part of Nutricom’s statement released Monday night.
The Nation the samples to the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (Mubas) laboratory in Blantyre for independent testing and analysis.
“According to Mubas results of the tested samples, one Health Kumbucha showed a 7.35 percent alcoholic content while Kombucha Ginger had 5.09 percent alcoholic content instead of the 0.005 percent indicated on the stickers. On the other hand, the results showed that Kombucha Divide imported from Zambia had 8.02 percent alcoholic content,” reads part of the story
