FedUp Foods marked the opening of its Wilmington facility this week in a building formerly occupied by TRU Colors Brewing.

The kombucha, cold brew coffee and other products that FedUp Foods, one of North America’s largest private fermented beverage manufacturers, produces and packages at the 715 Greenfield St. facility will be distributed to customers throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, said CEO David Gray. 

The Wilmington facility is the company’s third on the East Coast, with other locations at the company’s headquarters in Marshall, North Carolina, and in Erwin, Tennessee. FedUp Foods announced its plans to establish the Wilmington facility last May and had an “aggressive timeline” to get it up and running, Gray said.

The company’s leadership team, local officials and area business leaders turned out Wednesday at a ribbon-cutting event that capped a months-long renovation of the more than 130,000-square-foot building.

Sarah Mullins and Jeannine Buscher founded FedUp Foods in Asheville after they began brewing kombucha for their children in 2008.

“We were two moms just trying to create something nourishing for our families and for our communities,” Mullins said at Wednesday’s event, “never imagining that what started in a one-gallon jar on this kitchen counter would grow into this.”

“We did not start out to create a beverage company,” Buscher added. “We set out to create something that we felt good about sharing with the community, and our shared love for fermentation in kombucha was a starting point.”

Today, the company makes various flavors of kombucha and pre- and probiotic sodas, along with Tepache and functional cold brew coffee. Gray said the opening of the Wilmington facility is a “new chapter” for the company, allowing it to scale operations to meet customer demand.

That demand drove the company’s “aggressive” timeline, Gray said. FedUp Foods began negotiations to open the Wilmington facility in early 2024 and aimed to be up and running by September. They faced delays and didn’t meet that timeline, Gray said, but the Wilmington facility was able to produce its first sellable product in November.

Remnants of TRU Colors, the brewery founded by local businessman George Taylor to address gang violence, remain in the building. TRU Colors closed in 2022. FedUp Foods, for example, uses the original canning line, and a recording studio from TRU Colors is still a part of the building, although it hasn’t been used, said Sam Joseph, the facility’s packaging and warehouse manager.

The renovation has added a new bottling line (shown at right below), which can produce 150 glass bottles per minute, Joseph said, while the canning line turns out 200 cans per minute.

The company’s kombucha and coffee are brewed in-house inside large stainless steel vats, and the addition of a “tank farm” has helped add to the facility’s production capacity. The facility currently runs two production shifts and employs 74, Joseph said. Officials have said the facility will eventually have 100 employees.

Gray said that while the FedUp Foods had other options for its third facility, it chose Wilmington because of the company's existing connections to North Carolina, proximity to its corporate offices near Asheville and the “support of civic leadership.” Officials have also said that proximity to the port and rail service influenced their selection.

Greater Wilmington Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Natalie English said she sees the Wilmington area as a good fit for the company’s culture. She added that the company's presence “further solidifies" the region's place in the food manufacturing industry.