The Journey So Far, Part I: A World Without Stress
GM Talia + CEO Celeste @ the only event we got to do before lockdown | Celeste sending cases! | Adrienne taste testing adaptogens
by Celeste Perez, CEO of Dewdrop
A year ago, I had a vision: “What if women could drink their stress away?”
No, not like drink-drink, though I do enjoy a good cocktail. I was looking for a miracle potion, something that would magically resolve my issues and make me feel like a new person (I may have watched a lot of Disney growing up).
As a stress-case myself, I’d been struggling with my health. Even after years of sleepless nights, a constant cycle of colds, and a couple stints with a heart monitor, I’d never really considered that stress could be the root of each issue. While my doctors had prescribed something for every symptom, my mother (also a doctor), knew better. “You have to manage your stress,” she’d say.
So off to yoga I went, but then, during yet another late-night, insomnia-induced Google, I learned about adaptogens and their effects on stress hormones. “What?!” I thought, “There are plants out there that help our bodies deal with stress?” Within 24 hours (thanks, Amazon Prime), these magic adaptogens were in my kitchen.
Every day, I’d pour adaptogen powders and extracts into drinks and shakes, making muddy concoctions that tasted like, well, mud. I struggled to drink them, but the effects were real and life-changing. At last, I could sleep through the night, I wasn’t getting sick as often, and I felt calmer and less frazzled. Through adaptogens, I finally understood that emotional well-being is completely tied to physical wellness, and that plant magic is real.
But I still couldn’t deal with the taste of dirt.
I searched everywhere and tried whatever was on the shelves. Everything was either too earthy and lacking flavor, or full of sugar with no substance. Adaptogens seemed to exist only for energy drink bros and woo-woo alternative health fairies. There wasn’t a drink out there that spoke to stress in beautiful, uplifting tones, with thoughtful flavors and wholesome ingredients.
So we made it ourselves.
I immediately called Adrienne Borlongan, an incredible food scientist and ice cream flavor chemist, to see if she could figure out a way to make dirt taste like bliss. As a brand designer, I’d worked to create food and beverage concepts for others, naming my studio Well Fed because nourishment is so important to me. Together we’d previously designed and launched her successful brand Wanderlust Creamery, an experience that set us both on our current paths. When we started Dewdrop, her preemie twins were just 3 months old— but she came on board anyway and worked her magic.
After a few afternoons spent tinkering in my kitchen, we ended up with an elegant sparkling beverage rooted in centuries of plant medicine, with flavors that were just so beautiful and wholesome.
Pretty Balanced is made with juicy white peaches, revitalizing lemon verbena, nourishing moringa, which we know and love as malunggay in Filipino culture, and calming ashwagandha, an Ayurvedic staple. Pretty Bright features yuzu lemon, soothing ginger, and reishi, known as the mushroom of immortality in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Pretty Happy combines passion fruit and cacao, South American superfoods with beauty and mood-boosting benefits, and rhodiola, an energizing, fatigue-fighting adaptogen.
Instead of cheap flavor syrups and concentrates, we used whole fruit purées. Instead of refined sugars, sticky sweet monkfruit and stevia or erythritol, we used unprocessed coconut nectar, tapped straight from the tree. And, we created flavors that honor the herbal medicine traditions of so many cultures, instead of exploiting them and twisting them into unnatural compounds so far removed from their original purpose and integrity.
We named our drink Dewdrop because, in Filipino folklore, dewdrops were thought to be the healing teardrops of a goddess. If you drank them, you’d be healed… which is exactly what we were going for in the first place.
You can now find Dewdrop on shelf at Erewhon Market and select locations.
Check back for Part II of The Journey So Far: How We Really Got Here —> with a special announcement next week!
