[00:00:00] Courtney: People will say you are what you eat. No, you are what you absorb, and with compromised digestion and pesticides going within our system and all these other endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we experience regularly, your food is depleted, and your body's ability to process is depleted. And so I think focusing nowadays on people's mineral contents is key to thriving.
[00:00:23] Aneta: We often hear people wishing us a long, happy, and healthy life, but what if the length isn't what matters most? What if instead, it's the breadth depth, and purpose of each day that matters most? Welcome to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My name is Aneta Ardelian Kuzma and join me weekly as I interview guests who made changes in their own lives to live more fully with intention, gratitude, and joy. Be prepared to be inspired by their stories of how they shifted their mindset, took courageous action, and designed the life that they always wanted to live.
Welcome back to the Live the Width of Your Life podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in again this week. My guest today is Courtney Lorenz and she's the founder of Northern Michigan's first kombucha tea brewery. Courtney desires to share the health benefits reaped from living foods. She believes that each body has unique nutritional needs on the contrary to what is currently taught.
She's a lifelong food and beverage entrepreneur who creates value in the health and wellness industry. She's got a background in nutrition, and culinary arts, and it helps foster wellness within the community through education and functional nutrition. She supported multiple businesses through their growth phases, and she enjoys supporting her business through its growth.
She's a certified culinarian through the American Culinary Federation, a Reiki master, a certified meditation facilitator, and a NASM nutritionist. She's been published in Forbes, received five 40 under 40 awards, and was in the Great Lakes Culinary Institute's Alumni of the Year 2019. And in 2022, she received an Alumni of the Year award from Central Michigan University.
How many more accolades? She holds multiple businesses with their most current holding a top three nomination for small business of the year in Traverse City, Michigan. And Courtney is the real deal. We talked so much about just her mission and the inspiration and journey behind the cultured kombucha company.
And also talked about really her mission to help people understand wellness and how sometimes what we are taught or what we see in everyday media is not necessarily what is healthiest for us. She shares the history of starting her business. She talks about her focus as a female entrepreneur and really how she shares a portion of her sales towards helping end human trafficking. She commits 1 percent of her sales profits going towards raising awareness and ending this industry. We had such a great conversation. She is delightful and has so much wisdom and learnings from her journey. And she's so passionate about helping others on their own. I enjoyed our conversation and I think you will as well. Take a listen.
Thank you for joining me again on Live the Width of Your Life podcast. My guest today is Courtney Lorenz. Courtney, thank you so much for joining me today.
[00:03:18] Courtney: Oh, it is an absolute pleasure to be here today and share all things both nutrition and mindfulness.
[00:03:24] Aneta: I was so excited reading your bio because it's been a while since we've talked about nutrition and wellness in the way that I think we probably will today. And also I love talking to female entrepreneurs and I know that you are leveraging your entrepreneurship and your business in really positive ways.
So for those that maybe aren't as familiar with you or your cultured kombucha company, can you share just a little bit about your background and how you became interested in all the things that you are doing today?
[00:03:57] Courtney: Yeah, that's such a great question. So how did I start fermenting tea for a living? That's kind of an odd one. So, originally, I had gone to culinary school. I thought that I wanted to have a muffin shop, a cake shop, something along those lines. I grew up watching my mother and my grandmother baking, sitting on the counter with them.
As I got through culinary school, I found that there was an intense disconnect between food choices and an understanding of that food, And so I developed this really deep passion for helping people understand how food affects their bodies. we are living beings and we should eat like we're living beings.
And so for me, that became a point of passion to fuel my entrepreneurial journey. So after culinary school, I went to school to be a dietitian because I thought that that was the perfect connection, And I rapidly discovered that it was exceptionally clinical and, my little bit of crunchy hippie freshly out of culinary school, college vibe. I couldn't agree with it.
It was so off-ethos for me. Couldn't in good faith go around telling someone that they need to eat this amount of cheese each day and this amount of grain and this amount of meat and, vegetables, it just felt so systematic and disconnected and we're all just such unique beings and we have unique nutritional needs that are reflected in our bodies.
And so I went forward from there and got a degree in entrepreneurship and paired it with a nutrition minor thinking that I could at least carry forth some of that into whatever I was going to choose my career path to be. And in the summer of, I want to say it was 2018, I had a corporate gig, and it was for a very large Fortune 50 company.
And I knew going into the position, they were unethically aligned with my long-term goals, but I was determined to be a mosquito in the room, and change some perspectives. And so after being there for a year, I realized that it was pulling more energy from me than it was giving back.
And I had been volunteering at a farm on the side. And she had been paying me in farm produce for fun, So one day went home with a kombucha culture and had been making it at home and I'd make one gallon and I'd drink it all. And then I'd make five gallons and I couldn't quite drink it all. But I'm always down for a good challenge like that.
And so I started trading it for eggs or my first Reiki session as well. And eventually, I said, I have this incredible opportunity to make other people happy and healthy. Why am I not taking it? And so I left my corporate job with benefits and a salary to launch a cultured kombucha company. And here we are just going on nine years later.
[00:06:52] Aneta: Wow. So inspired by that, first of all, that you knew at such a young age, it sounds like you knew somatically internally. that there was a disconnect and that what you were learning did not resonate or it wasn't in integrity with what you believed to be true. So first of all, do you feel the dietician practice, I don't even know the education, like, is it supported to promote the sort of the USDA pyramid or what were the food pyramid is it aligned to that? Or What is the basis of most dietitian sort of schools or education?
[00:07:27] Courtney: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think it presents itself to the public eye a little bit differently than what it is internally, but it is almost exactly as you stated. It is catered towards a medical clinical understanding and the government food pyramid, essentially.
And so you learn about body systems and function and that, like my nerd side soaked it right up. It was so cool to learn about glycolysis in the liver. All of these other systems function and your detox pathways and the different functions of your endocrine system and your HPA axis.
And that was fundamentally unique. That was a very large learning point for me. But I couldn't turn around and say, okay, I want to put a patient in a hospital who probably doesn't even want to see me, I don't want to go in and give them nutritional advice as a diabetic and say as a diabetic we need you to adapt this lifestyle, which I may or may not agree with ethically. And so it was a unique challenge to navigate knowing that you wanted to help people in a specific field but intuitively knowing that the available training was not going to provide an optimal healing environment for those you wanted it to affect.
[00:08:34] Aneta: Were you always intuitive? Did you always have that gift? Were you always tuned in?
[00:08:39] Courtney: I think you are the first person to pick up on this and that's interesting. And so I can appreciate that a lot. Yes. But it's also hard to talk about sometimes too, with people who can't relate or understand. And so I had a gut feeling and for a very long time, I didn't know what it was or how to address it.
And it was probably almost considered overwhelming. Until in my twenties, dug in to figure out how to use it appropriately. And that's a lifelong journey too. But to know that you have that gut instinct and that gut intuition and whether you feel it in a hearing sensation, seeing sensation, all-knowing sensation, whatever that clear cognizance comes through as learning to be with that, I think is one of the best learning experiences you can have as a human.
[00:09:22] Aneta: Absolutely. I believe all of us can tap into it. It's just that our education our environment and our conditioning don't necessarily support it. We're very focused on, our thinking mind and not connected necessarily to the body. And so I love this idea of your intuition and then also recognizing food as medicine and food as nourishment and food is important.
How did your experience working on the farm either strengthen what you were already starting to develop or what did you learn during that process? Because it seems amazing to be able to be right there where there's an even stronger connection to the earth and growth and nourishment.
[00:10:07] Courtney: Absolutely. So one thing that I picked up on during my experience on the farm was the polarities and the mass differences between what we were eating at the grocery store and what we were getting from the farm, even though they technically present the same.
So there are fundamental studies that will tell you that between certified organic produce in conventional produce, the nutritional and mineral content differences are astounding. Organic produce has a far higher residual mineral content. The company that I was working for at that time was Dow Chemical.
And so, right. And so I was the cafe manager for all of the staff for the Dow plants. And so I was like, I'm going to get these people healthy food. I'm going to teach them what healthy living is. Meanwhile, right outside the factory, they're manufacturing roundup. Talk about a big giant to like, that's a big hill.
It was a heavy hill to die on, I guess. And so knowing that within the same county at this farm that I was volunteering on, these passionate people were choosing to live a life that put others first in their form of nutrition and health and wellness, and lived a simple life to be able to do so.
And then on the opposite side of the county, there are testing fields for genetically modified seeds going on. And like the dichotomy, and that was powerful in getting to experience both extreme ends of that system. And I think just from an experiential standpoint, the ability to put your feet in the dirt is so underrated, right?
I mean, we are electrical beings when it comes down to it. Yeah. And if we're electrical beings and if putting our feet into the ground, allows us to take those ions in and to experience that and to physically recharge ourselves, which has been proven time over time now. Grounding's not a hokey pokey thing. It's real.
[00:11:57] Aneta: Science, it's real. Without shoes, without the plastic or the rubber soles or the barriers that prevent us from being able to do that.
[00:12:07] Courtney: Which you have to wonder, I mean, yeah, is it helpful, but like, when did that come into play and why? If our feet do that as a human, does that imagine what that plant needs and imagine, from a certified organic or a small homestead with the nutrient differences in that versus what you're getting in a large-scale organic farm where they have to apply a certain amount of pesticide or nutrients to even get it to grow.
[00:12:29] Aneta: Yeah. Tell us about the difference, maybe for folks that aren't that familiar with the difference because I think some people only buy organic, and then some can't afford to buy organic. So that's a whole other financial issue, and some just say, well, what's the difference?
They look the same, but they're not. So maybe just talk a little bit, like you said, about the mineral content and the quality of what is available in terms of nourishment from conventional to organic.
[00:12:57] Courtney: Yeah, great point. So we were talking about this earlier in the week as a team and we had two cups next to each other and one had certified organic blueberries in it and one had not conventional blueberries in it and from a distance, you'd probably never know which one was which, right?
If you just looked to the naked eye. But when you take that blueberry and you pick it apart and you put it through nutritional profile you're going to see a lot of different diversity in the mineral content that it can uptake from the soil. So one of the things that I am passionate about and that I think is starting to become acknowledged within modern nutrition is it's, as a society now we're fed like it's not the volume of calorie malnourishment that we're experiencing.
We're experiencing dysfunction from a hormonal disruption standpoint from a lack of minerals and the inability to absorb those minerals nowadays. And so as we look at these plants, not only are the plants coming to us with less nutrition within them because they are nonorganic and they're inhibited in their ability to uptake nutrients from the soil and manifest them and grow into whatever fruits of the labor that plant is creating.
But our bodies are in environments nowadays that make it far more strenuous or challenging to be able to digest that food properly and to uptake the nutrients you need to thrive. People will say you are what you eat. No, you are what you absorb, and with compromised digestion and pesticides going within our system and all these other endocrine-disrupting chemicals that we experience regularly, your food is depleted, and your body's ability to process is depleted.
And so I think focusing nowadays on people's mineral contents is key to thriving.
[00:14:38] Aneta: So true. I love that. It's not what you eat. It's what you absorb, which is so important. And it's really funny that I have these trace mineral drops, like literally sitting next to me because I put them in my water. After all, I heard about this, like from hydration energy, but it's insane to me sometimes to think about the fact that I need to put something back in my water because I'm not getting it naturally from my food supply. After all, the soil has changed over time because my body's not able to process or digest everything.
So are you a supporter of using sort of mineral drops and adding them in? What are some of the benefits?
[00:15:17] Courtney: Definitely. So if you look in the back of that mineral bottle, I believe it's going to tell you like a breakdown, but essentially what it is, is that it's concentrated seawater and they just take out some of the salinity. So it's not overwhelming.
But you're getting a diverse salt profile. I believe you're getting boron. I believe you're getting different forms of magnesium. You're probably getting some selenium as well. So all of these things that your body, like you think of them as like, we just need like a microgram. Yeah. But a microgram can be a lot to an independent necessary hormone system to make your body function,
[00:15:48] Aneta: It's so true. Yeah. I'd never noticed that before. Cause my eyesight's probably so bad, but it says concentrated seawater and yeah, it's got the magnesium chloride, sodium, potassium, sulfate, lithium, and boron and I heard this was something good to add. And so I do feel better drinking it and adding it in, but it's just another example of how it's so important for us to be our advocates and be educated on some of these things.
Now, you run Cultured Kombucha Company, and we talked at the beginning a little bit about this, but for those that have never had kombucha, it's so delicious tell me about your first experience having it and then why you decided that this was something that you were passionate about and wanted to start your business around it.
[00:16:31] Courtney: Yeah, that's a great question. I started a culture kombucha company after working on the farm. I had originally gotten the opportunity to try it on the farm. A lot of the times when you're out in the sun all day, and you're working intensely, water isn't necessarily the best thing after a while because you're sweating out, again, those minerals and nutrients that you need to make your body thrive.
And so, the women on the farm would drink kombucha in the afternoon, or partial kombucha, partial water. Very similar concept to farmers drinking what was referred to as switchel back in the day, which is an apple cider vinegar tonic. And so I had gotten curious and started brewing on that level, but specifically on that farm to touch lastly on that mineral conversation.
I had this at this moment actually, although painfully kind of, it just so affirmed my life path in the sense of helping people understand their bodies and their nutrition. So that was my first time experiencing true farm produce, like regularly. And so I wasn't going to the grocery store anymore. I was eating exclusively out of the boxes I was getting each week.
I had an aha moment when I developed a kidney stone. Because the mineral content was so intense compared to the grocery store food my body couldn't quite adapt fast enough. And if that isn't a testament, and I learned from it going forward, don't get me wrong. But it was just crazy to see that for the first 20-something years of my life, I had been eating this standardized conventional produce from the grocery store.
Assuming that a head of broccoli is a head of broccoli no matter what. And then I switched to the farm produce and within three months my body was like, holy cow not sure if we can uptake this as fast, give us time to process it. And so when you can look at it from that level and it speaks to the crazy difference in just the way our bodies work that kind of started my healing journey and my passion towards showing people like there's a big difference here.
[00:18:18] Aneta: What is that? Is that the calcification like that was happening in your kidneys because of the minerals?
[00:18:25] Courtney: I think so. It was a part of the calcification. I probably wasn't getting enough water at the time as well. And so that would support it. Fault of my own there, but it was such a like boom in your face example of you're supposed to know more about this.
You're supposed to be able to take that forward. And so, I did. And in starting culture, kombucha, again, the passion was to teach people about their health. And so I knew that I had been drinking kombucha on the farm and I loved it and I knew hands down, it was better than the national brand. And I knew deep down inside myself that although we made an incredible product, the reality is that the company, isn't about the product. We make a great, kombucha and we'll stand out on the shelf for sure. But the reality is that kombucha teaches people about their health and wellness.
And so if a consumer can pick up a bottle and learn what a probiotic is. Or pick up a bottle and understand how to read a label or learn what certified organic is, or anything about that pushes them towards their health and wellness journey, we've done it. We've helped people and that's our goal.
[00:19:28] Aneta: So how do you take from making something at home? What's the starter kit called again? The mother, what is it called?
[00:19:34] Courtney: The Scoby, the mother's Scoby. Yep.
[00:19:37] Aneta: Mother's cubby. Yeah. So how do you go from doing that to then manufacturing this and holding integrity and the highest quality, everything that was so important to you as you were building this company?
[00:19:49] Courtney: So when I started building cultured absolutely quality was the first point of manufacturing. We were ahead of the time a little bit before kombucha got cool. And so when I got into the industry and started making kombucha and building a manufacturing center the technology for it didn't exist.
So we had to kind of take a little bit of information from the beer industry a little bit from wine and a little bit from soda. And we had to make this like, Minaj of all of these different understandings to figure out what could work for our industry. I bootstrapped the company from day one to current, and we've just continued to reinvest along the way.
And I think that as simple as it might appear, the authenticity is really what's carried the company through. There's been other companies that have been a flash in the pan. and it might be a slow course of growth, but we're still chugging along and we serve about 500 different retail locations currently. And that's a lot of lives to touch.
[00:20:55] Aneta: It's a lot of lives to touch and it's amazing. You've been doing this for nine years. And I know one of the things that I read is that you also take a certain percentage of your sales profits towards awareness of ending human trafficking. So tell me a little bit about your passion behind that and how you decided that you were going to use your business, not just from a nutritional perspective for doing good, but also impacting society more largely.
[00:21:24] Courtney: Yeah. So one thing I've kind of come to understand one thing that I know that I understand is that I think human trafficking is the largest issue that we will face within our lifetime. On a personal level, that's what I believe. I think it is the ugliest side of humanity. I think it's the most brutal side of humanity.
And I think it's one of the most hidden sides of humanity, even though it's in our face sometimes. But you take it one step back before we talk about such a heavy subject. As I built the business, I found that it follows three P's. And I think we've heard about that in marketing a lot. If you go through marketing class, you'll hear about product placement and promotion, these are the P's of marketing. In life, I found that the three P's were passion purpose, to power. So I knew my gut instinct was kind of guiding me in this area of passion. Like I knew that food and wellness was an area for me to grow in. And so I took that with the kombucha path and I knew that I could bring purpose within that.
So my purpose was to build a business, to educate people, and to bring them a greater quality of living through culture. But once we get to that point of establishing your purpose and your thriving, you can use that platform that you've built to be a power for good. And so, my opportunity within this is to choose to stand in the light and to talk about subjects that need to be changed within our lifetime.
And human trafficking is that for me. It hits on many facets, and I think it's a subject that when people hear it, they think it's farther disassociated from them than it is when it's usually happening right in your backyard.
[00:23:02] Aneta: Yeah. I just applaud you for doing that and for standing behind such an important mission. And I agree with you. I think that it is something that we sometimes like to think isn't happening because it could be very frightening exactly where we are. And like anything in life, it's so important for us to become more, better educated.
So going back to a little bit of the business side of things too, what are some of the biggest lessons you've learned nine years into your business about yourself, about running a company, about anything that entrepreneurship and just in general?
[00:23:37] Courtney: Great question. It's a big question.
[00:23:41] Aneta: A big question. Yeah.
[00:23:42] Courtney: It's really big question. There are a lot of ways you could go, but I think the overarching theme, no puns and all puns intended is to follow your gut. I followed my gut into Kombucha and now we heal people's guts. Outside of that, I knew my gut instinct.
The first time I saw someone being trafficked at a truck stop. That was my gut intuition telling me this situation wasn't right. Help this person. And so I think you are innately and divinely gifted with an intuition. That is your gut. Heal it. Work with it. Understand it. Follow it. And trust it. Like, for God's sake, trust it. Learn to trust it.
Learn to work with it. Learn to build that trust muscle with yourself. Because it is your guiding source. And the times that I have chosen not to follow my gut, I wish I had. And so overarching in business, it might not necessarily be what someone might call a logical decision from a financial standpoint a timing standpoint, or a launching standpoint.
But if your gut's telling you to, and you're authentically in tune with yourself, follow it.
[00:24:48] Aneta: Well, how would you encourage someone to do that? Maybe if they have never done that before or they've never really tapped into their intuition, are there things or practices that have been supported for you? Because it sounds like maybe you already had that and you were in tune with it, but is there something that you're currently doing that allows you to continue to grow and trust your intuition?
[00:25:08] Courtney: Yeah, that's a great point. So I would love to know more about what you've seen with this development process in your clients too, because I think it's a lifelong understanding we're always growing and changing. It was a long journey.
I mean, it probably began earlier in life, but I started working on it in my early to mid-twenties. I was introduced to holistic health and then that transpired into Reiki and then Reiki went down like four different styles of meditation. And so I got into all of these modalities and these different experiences where people were choosing a different style of life.
And that opened up a lot of probably like self-awareness. And within that developmental process of that self-awareness, I think it was just practice and trust over time with myself, you hear it, and you either choose to act on it or you don't, you feel it, you choose to act on it, or you don't.
And so I believe with each of these new modalities that I was introduced to, and then I practiced, I gained that greater self-awareness and also that trust muscle over time, per se. Yeah, practice makes perfect in that sense.
[00:26:20] Aneta: Yeah. I love that you brought up all the different modalities because I want people to remember learning to trust yourself again and tapping in requires us to get out of our heads. And somatically into our bodies. So the things that allow you to drop deeper within the body and to hear and to feel, like, as you said, those nudges, it could feel like an instinct.
It could feel like some energy shifts. It could be like a gut feeling. And so that could be different learning to trust and understand what that is. But yes, meditation, somatic breathing, yoga, it's really, quiet reflection morning pages, journaling, all of these things that allow you to just stop seeking external answers and returning internally to yourself and learning to hear, to feel, and to trust it.
And as you said, and then taking action based on that. Celebrating, okay, yeah, something told me to go right. Not left. And that's a good thing. I'm going to trust myself more next time. And then I think the mind quiets and then the body starts to speak. And that's where we really can tap into it. That's what I've seen for myself and with my clients over and over again.
[00:27:32] Courtney: Yeah, it is for some people, a very scary process to come back into your body, we've been conditioned to disassociate. We live in high-stimulus environments. We're always told to go. And I think part of that is to keep us from sitting still because when you do, you get back into your power.
And you understand yourself when you tune in and you make better choices. But that. lifestyle conditioning partnered with a lot of people living in fight or flight or, escape mode 24 seven can be an uncomfortable process to work back into your body for sure. And so I applaud anyone doing that.
[00:28:10] Aneta: Yes, and because it doesn't feel safe or it's very unfamiliar, if it's not a safety issue, it could just be that's so unfamiliar. And sometimes people will say, well, I don't want to meditate or to sit quietly because I don't want to hear. What am I here? So sometimes the intuition is telling you there's something here you need to hear and address, but we don't always sit with ourselves to do it.
And speaking of intuition, I was just thinking. I think I read and correct me if I'm wrong, that animals actually, they can tell whether something is genetically modified and they won't eat it.
That's fascinating. Yeah. And so I thought about it like birds and for example, corn, that's GMO versus not. They won't eat it. They know they can sense the difference. And so it's like, wow, that's so fascinating that they're so connected to the earth, connected to nourishment, connected to what is real or not real. But because we have created this disconnection, and disassociation, as you said, not only would we not be able to necessarily tell the difference, but we also don't care.
A lot of people just don't care. They don't see the benefit of choosing something that is more nutritionally dense or organic or doesn't have pesticides, for example. So that was just an interesting thing on intuition comparing animals to maybe humans.
[00:29:32] Courtney: That's I would love to learn more about that. That's fascinating. I think that the other side of it too is, that you're saying potentially people might not care. And I think the flip side of that too, is that I want to say it was Winston Churchill. He had a quote that was something about your nervous system or no, maybe it wasn't him, but it doesn't matter who said it.
Your nervous system will always choose a slightly familiar and uncomfortable hell. Then a challenging heaven for some time. And then you get to live in the pleasure of it. We were more apt to sit in this discomfort. That's like mild discomfort on the day-to-day.
Yeah. And pushing through a little bit of challenge to get to the other side. I think that people sometimes have the perception of putting in the work as people will do maybe physical work or maybe they don't even want to do that. But like the real, it's the mental work.
Like it's sitting in that suck for some time to work through it, to get to the other side. And so choosing to implement the work on yourself, I think is one of the greatest investments you can ever make.
[00:30:27] Aneta: I completely agree. How do you feel about this trend of starting to create fake meat and more meat in laboratories? Yeah, I know. It's a heavy topic. It frightens me to be quite honest.
[00:30:41] Courtney: There's no need to consider feeding a worldly population. That's not a thing anymore. Everyone can get access to food. If you want to say you want to genetically modify things to save the world and stop nutrition, it's a lie. I believe that humans are electrical beings. We have frequencies within that electricity, and I think that we operate off of frequencies being high or low, emotions regulate with that.
Plants have vibration frequencies like these aren't things that are considered quantum physics anymore. They're measurable. You can see Reiki on a scan in a hospital. You know what I mean? You can't disacknowledge it anymore.
When we choose hyper-processed foods that are disassociated like that, it's an instant vibrational downgrade. Instantaneously. Not even considering all the damage it's doing to your system. The rationalization that has to occur to choose those foods. Like, say you want to be a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian for 10 years.
I understand. I did choose to go back to eating meat. But if we're going to say that choosing a plant-based Frankenburger is more kind to the environment, and the animals, than a potential actual animal meat. When you think about the fields that had to be grown in and then the chemical plant that it had to be processed in, what was in that field, and what got run over with the plow?
How many pesticides went into drinking water and hurt fish in a local stream? What effect did it have on the people on the other end of that tap water from their endocrine systems? What about the CO2 emissions from that plant that it was manufactured in and the animals at that heart? What about the trucks that were on the road to get it there?
It lacks a larger picture perspective. And that's what I encourage people to step back and see is like in this aspect of choosing what we think might be healthier or more ethical choices. Do the research and understand and go back to simplicity when possible.
[00:32:38] Aneta: Yeah. Ask yourself, what did it take for this food to be here on my plate?
What was the least amount of steps, the most natural, what is the most natural? And so yeah, just some interesting things. So what is your hope for everybody, maybe for people who are listening, what are a couple of things that they can do right now that could dramatically impact their health?
[00:33:03] Courtney: That's a great question. I would encourage people to take a step back from their day-to-day and give themselves time to tune back into their gut intuition. Because again, when you heal your gut, both physically and mentally, you can drastically change your life. So I encourage people to step back and evaluate their intuition from a gut perspective And give yourself the time, space, and honor to come back and tune into that. And then on the flip side of it, use that same gut intuition to make great educated choices to make your body better for yourself on a day-to-day basis.
[00:33:39] Aneta: So true. And speaking of gut health, one of the benefits of kombucha gut health, it is like a wonderful supportive way to heal your gut to make sure that you've got the right probiotics in there. So tell us a little bit about those benefits. I don't think we made the connection in case people have never had kombucha.
[00:33:58] Courtney: Yeah, so kombucha is amazing. Kombucha is a tea that's fermented, but it's fermented for health instead of alcohol. So within that fermentation process, you're getting probiotics, live cultures, and digestive enzymes. All of these great benefits support your body on the day to day basis.
So when you think about kombucha and its fermentation style, think about sauerkraut, yogurt, sourdough bread, kimchi, those styles of fermenting and what they do for your body, kombucha is along those same lines, and if you pick up a bottle, it's going to be a little bit tart, a little bit sweet, and a little bit bubbly.
[00:34:32] Aneta: I love the fizz. The bubbly is so good. It's a fun bubble and I just feel special. And I think that for many people who are also sober and curious right now, and who limited their alcohol intake, I would highly recommend kombucha. Put it in a fun glass and it could just be something that could be a wonderful substitute.
You're doing something healthy for yourself, but it's a replacement for those who feel like they have to replace alcohol with something else. It's a wonderful thing to have. Courtney, you're just so amazing. You're doing such amazing work in the world. So for those who would like to work with you, where can they find cultured kombucha?
And what other ways can people find you either online or just if they want to contact you to learn a little bit more about what you do?
[00:35:15] Courtney: Yes. So if you're interested in culture kombucha, you can head on over to our website at www.drinkculture.com and there's an online store locator there. In addition to that you can hop on over to our Instagram page and if you want some mocktail guides, we'd love to send you a mocktail kit.
So just send us a message there. And if you are interested in launching your food product line, or you're curious about a product that you think could change the world shoot us a message and we can talk about co-packing too.
[00:35:43] Aneta: That's fantastic. I didn't know you did that. That's amazing. How big is your team now?
[00:35:48] Courtney: So our team is seven people. Yep, so we are a small but mighty team.
[00:35:53] Aneta: We will be sure to include all of those links in the show notes. I just really enjoyed our conversation. I learned so much myself and today I hope other people did as well. I highly encourage everyone to check out those links to buy your kombucha from the Cultured Kombucha Company and just to reach out to Courtney and she's just a wealth of information. Thank you so much for your time today.
[00:36:17] Courtney: Great. Thank you as well. It was a pleasure. And we're looking forward to helping people tune into their gut intuition.
[00:36:22] Aneta: Thank you for listening to today's episode. If today's conversation inspired you to dream again, break out of your comfort zones, or reflect on what it means to you to live more fully, then please follow this podcast because every week you'll hear more stories from people just like you who took imperfect action towards their goals, created more joy and are living the life that they always dreamt of living.