Hip Pop

They were. Kombucha pulled ahead of everything else, and a period of iteration followed. By 2021, they'd stripped back to focus entirely on gut health drinks, ditched the Booch & Brine name, and relaunched as Hip Pop. The new name was designed to signal something broader: not just kombucha, but a whole category of functional soft drinks built around the same principle of doing something genuinely useful for the gut while actually tasting good.

The Manchester-based operation now runs a proper production facility with around twenty staff. Their range covers classic kombucha flavours, a CBD kombucha line, and living sodas — the latter being the category they developed partly to reach drinkers who find kombucha's tangy, fermented character too sharp an entry point. All Hip Pop drinks contain Bacillus Coagulans, a heat-stable probiotic bacteria that survives the canning process and the journey through the digestive system, which is more than can be said for many fermented drinks that can't survive pasteurisation.

That technical detail matters in the gut health drinks space, where the gap between claimed and actual probiotic content is wide. Bacillus Coagulans is well-studied, stable, and suited to ready-to-drink formats. Hip Pop built their range around it rather than retrofitting it, which gives the health credentials more credibility than they'd have otherwise.

In terms of scale, they sold 3.8 million cans in 2024. That's a number that puts them well beyond the craft-small-batch category and into genuine mass-market territory. Sainsbury's and Morrisons stock the range in the UK, and the brand has expanded into Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Dubai, and the US.

What the Hip Pop story reflects is a specific moment in the UK drinks market: the point at which gut health stopped being a specialist health food concern and became a mainstream consumer category. Hip Pop arrived early enough to establish a clear identity and has grown with the market rather than scrambling to catch up.

The cans are well-designed and the flavours are broadly accessible. It's not the most adventurous kombucha on the market — some of the craft producers do more interesting things with fermentation — but Hip Pop is making a different bet: that volume, consistency, and supermarket availability matter more than artisanal credentials at this particular price point. So far, the market agrees.