The Company That Owns Honest Tea Will Make You Pause

You might honestly think Honest Tea is owned by a tea company, but honestly, you'd be wrong (though not alone). A CapitolOne Shopping survey found that 54% of people in the United States believe that a tea company owns Honest Tea. Just like another beverage company secretly owns Johnnie Walker and Texas Roadhouse quietly owns two other chain restaurants, Honest Tea actually has a larger parent corporation, and one that is very familiar to Americans and around the world: Coca-Cola.

However, Coca-Cola was not the original creators and distributors of Honest Tea — that distinction belongs to the co-founders, Barry Nalebuff and Seth Goldman, who started the brand in Bethesda, Maryland in 1998 as an organic RTD beverage. They raised $1 million in start up funds for the company between 1999 and 2000, which would eventually go up to $10 million over the course of the next decade. Coca-Cola bought a 40% stake in the brand in the form of a $43 million investment in 2008, helping to increase sales three times over to a whopping $71 million between 2007 and 2010. In 2011, the company was fully bought out by Coca-Cola, which eventually discontinued the production of Honest Tea in 2022 despite still owning the rights to the brand. The same year, Goldman — who had served as the CEO of Honest Tea until 2015, — moved on to forming a new tea company: Just Ice Tea.

If you invested $1,000 in Coca-Cola 10 years ago, you'd be a richer person today and if you invested that same amount 70 years ago, you'd be wealthy beyond your wildest desires. That's because Coca-Cola is more than just its signature drink. Beyond soft drinks, Coca-Cola became a powerhouse company by acquiring other brands and products, including some that were marketed as "healthy" alternatives to soft drinks. If you've been paying attention to its history, it should come as no surprise that it bought out Honest Tea. In a similar fashion, Minute Maid was acquired by Coca-Cola in 1960 for $59 million and was the company's first foray outside of soda. In 2007, the producer of Vitamin Water, Glaceau, was bought for $4.2 billion. Coca-Cola took ownership over Fuze, a producer of juice, tea, and energy drinks, also in 2007.

Beyond just buying other brands and product lines that are connected to healthy and clean eating, Coca-Cola rolled out Simply Pop in 2025, calling it a "fruit-forward line of beverages." The company is looking to compete in the market of gut-digestive health drinks, which, according to Dataintelo, had a global market size valued around $12.8 billion as of 2023, though that's estimated to hit $27.4 billion by 2032 as younger generations are looking for healthy alternatives to traditional sodas with lots of sugar. The company also takes pride in offering 250 reduced or no-sugar beverages out of the 800 that it sells in the United States alone. "... we're reducing sugar in many of our beverages and making our reduced-and no-sugar drinks easier to find in more places," the company noted on the official Coca-Cola website.