When Cath first offered Turbo Tonic to Leigh locals in lockdown, she swore she'd never make more than 100 bottles a week, never expand beyond the Matakana market and the “honesty fridge” that still sits at the front of her house, and certainly never take on a commercial lease or a "grown-up" bottling plant.

Fast forward a few years and Cath has found herself in Never Never Land.

Turbo Tonic started during COVID as a way to share the immunity-boosting and anti-inflammatory properties of turmeric with her community (as well as a drink that’s phenomenal when you’re feeling sick and helps soothe a sore throat). At the time, she was using a home fruit juicer to juice fresh turmeric and ginger root each week.

The Turbo Tonic increased simply because people found it helped, and so word spread. She began selling it at the Matakana Farmers Market. One juicer became three, then six, then eleven, all operating at once in the small commercial kitchen in the basement of her house. Working full-time as a food tech teacher, she’d been hesitant to take that step, but the Matakana Markets were familiar ground—she’d previously run a couple of stalls there selling crêpes and Mexican food some years prior.

The Turbo Tonic market stall only brought more attention to the product. Soon, stores were asking to stock it, and Cath had to make her first really big call: investing in an imported commercial juicer. Reluctantly, she decided it had to be done (turmeric has a habit of completely destroying home juicers) and bit the bullet—shipping one over from China and figuring out how to make it work, resigning from her teaching job and taking the plunge.

From there, expansion happened quickly: employees, lime juice by the pallet, a walk-in chiller—all added to her property in Leigh.

Then, a few months ago, and despite her best "Tetris-like" efforts to make everything fit, Cath was forced to acknowledge that there simply wasn’t enough space left on the property to meet the growing demand. Her driveway, now jam-packed with pallets, could no longer fit a car, and it didn’t feel right to subject her neighbours to what had effectively become an industrial operation.

Incredibly, the Daily Organics bottling plant became available just at the right time, and Cath was encouraged to take another giant leap of faith and move her and her team into the fabulous facility that Delwyn and Brad had built over the previous eight years. And so now TT has a home of its own and plenty of room to grow.

The fact that Turbo Tonic has come this far—despite its founder’s insistence that she’d never, ever sell more than a few bottles a week, and certainly never manufacture outside her home—is not due to big flashy marketing campaigns, but simply due to the fact that people have found "TT works" and have welcomed it into their daily wellness routines and recommended TT to friends and family.

Cath is at pains to insist that she would not have arrived at where she is so happy to be, a place she'd never intended to get to, without the support of her incredible team, mentors, and this very special community.