Pickle sparkling water sells out and lands six-month Ocado exclusive
YEW Drink put brine, dill and cucumber in a can, ran out of it, and talked a national grocer into six exclusive months at £1.69.
Pickle is having a moment, and a two-year-old drinks company has just turned it into a shelf listing.
YEW Drink launched what it describes as the UK's first pickle-flavoured sparkling water on 1 July, through Planet Organic and its own site.
The company says the direct allocation sold out within weeks. Its online store now shows the flavour as gone.
Next comes Ocado, with a six-month grocery exclusive at £1.69 a can.
The recipe is six ingredients: sparkling water, organic kombucha, natural cucumber and dill pickle flavourings, lactic acid and salt. A 330ml can carries two calories and 0.03g of salt, with no sugar and no sweeteners.
The kombucha and the lactic acid supply the sour edge that sweeteners usually imitate. It is a chef's solution, which is the point.
Jesse Jenkins, the co-founder who cooks, built the flavour on kitchen logic rather than category research.
The other founder spotted the gap from abroad. Francesca Zampi says she spent nearly a decade in the US, where stylish soft seltzers are mainstream, and came home to a British shelf that offered sugar at one end and wellness promises at the other.
YEW started in London in 2023 and went nationwide through Selfridges in September 2024. It now reports more than 2,000 retail partnerships, on its own figures, across Pink Rhubarb, Green Apple, Yuzu Grapefruit and Pickle.
The interesting part is what the can does not say. YEW's own copy reads: "More energy. Better sleep. Inner calm. We can't promise you any of that."
That is a deliberate bet against the functional soda playbook. The company put out the most gut-health-coded flavour in food and attached no health claim to it whatsoever.
The timing has not hurt. CNN has called pickle a flavour of the moment, and Kerry's 2026 Taste Charts record dill pickle growing by up to 900% across categories, while FoodNavigator has written up a boom in British pickle drinks.
YEW says BeverageDaily named the launch among its top drinks of the summer.
For any founder selling something the multiples have not yet copied, the sequence here is worth reading twice. A small direct launch proved demand with real money, the sell-out became the pitch, and the pitch bought six months of national distribution before a larger rival could reformulate.
Speed was the whole asset. The trend arrived, a chef already had the recipe, and the can was on sale while the category was still arguing about credible health benefits.
