Blended and branded: The business behind Erewhon smoothie collabs

If there’s one thing Erewhon is known for, it’s a spendy smoothie.

The California-based gourmet grocery store’s drink collabs began in 2021 with influencers like Christina Najjar, who is known online as Tinx, and Marianna Hewitt, co-founder of skin-care brand Summer Fridays. But it was Hailey Bieber who really kickstarted Erewhon’s celeb smoothie craze with a co-branded Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie that promoted the launch of Rhode Skin in 2022. At one point, Erewhon was reportedly selling more than 40,000 of Bieber’s smoothies every month; in October, it sold out of a $100 DIY kit to make it at home.

In recent years, well-known figures like Sabrina Carpenter, Sofia Richie Grainge, Olivia Rodrigo, Bella Hadid, and Emma Chamberlain have followed suit, stamping their names (and in some cases, brands) on Erewhon drinks. The virality has not gone unnoticed by other brands: Each celebrity smoothie recipe has up to five that pay to be included in the ingredient list, Vito Antoci, EVP at Erewhon, told us.

Other brands, like Salt & Stone, Vacation sunscreen, and Frankies Bikinis, have opted to create and, Antoci said, fully fund their own drinks, ranging from smoothies to elixirs, with the status-symbol grocer. Those drinks are part of Erewhon’s membership program, where about 60,000 people pay up to $200 per year to get perks that include a free branded drink each month and quarter. The branded drinks (of which there are, according to Antoci, 16 every year) are also available to paying nonmembers.

The goal from Erewhon’s side, Antoci said, is to “provide customers a sense of community around health and wellness.” For brand partners, the benefits can include everything from boosting brand awareness to building community in the LA market and beyond.

Smooth operators

To be eligible to create a membership drink, a brand must sell their products at Erewhon stores, Antoci said. Brands are also responsible for covering the cost of the membership drinks distributed during the first two weeks of the month.

Interested brands have the chance to approach Erewhon with their idea in October, which is when decisions for next year’s drinks are made, according to Antoci. Sometimes brands are pitched: Arjan Singh, co-founder and head of brand marketing and operations at Jolie Skin Co, said Erewhon approached the brand to make its Spring of Youth elixir drink, which was sold at the grocery-store chain this past April.

Singh said the opportunity was too good to pass up, as it gave Jolie the chance to position itself as a beauty brand to Erewhon customers. “People look to [Erewhon] as having a lot of credibility when it comes to creating a drink,” he said. “We were inspired for that reason.”

In total, more than 15,000 Spring of Youth drinks were sold in April, he said.

The goal of the partnership was not to drive Jolie showerhead sales, Singh said, but he noted that Jolie’s sales numbers are higher at Erewhon compared to larger retailers and so their relationship is “punching way above its weight.”

Blending in

Like Jolie, many brands that have partnered with Erewhon on membership drinks have not been food brands. Abby Tellam, CMO of body- and skin-care brand Salt & Stone, said the Salt & Serve Smoothie, a coconut-creme soft-serve smoothie containing olive oil and sea salt that was sold at Erewhon in October 2024, marked the brand’s “first edible venture.”

Transforming bath products into edible creations isn’t always easy. “It definitely needed to make sense from a flavor-profile perspective so that people weren’t like, ‘I’m drinking a body wash,’” Tellam said. “But we weren’t necessarily concerned that people would be put off by eating something edible that’s inspired by our products.”

For Salt & Stone, Tellam said the goal was brand awareness and to further connect with the LA community, where the brand is based. It seems to have worked: Salt & Stone’s Instagram post about the smoothie was its most-liked post at the time, Tellam said, and in total, the collab drove more than 4 million impressions from influencer and UGC content. It also saw a sales lift of its body products at Erewhon: Salt & Stone is currently the No. 1 body brand at the store, she said.

Toothpaste brand Boka is the partner behind this month’s Mint Condition Smile Smoothie membership drink, which costs $11 for nonmembers. Kinsey Butler, senior director of brand marketing at Boka, said that when it came to designing the smoothie, her team knew they wanted a mint flavor and for it to match the brand’s colors. Ultimately, they landed on a combination of green tea, mint, mango, chlorophyll, and blue spirulina.

Butler said she didn’t hesitate to make Boka the first Erewhon partner to create a toothpaste-inspired smoothie, especially given the store’s past work with body-care brands. “We found in the past that one of the best ways to bring [our] flavors to life is through food and beverage,” she said.

Still, it can be a polarizing choice. Some Instagram comments have indicated that the toothpaste-inspired flavor may be a bit too close to the real thing.

Jaemee Vanden Boogaard, senior retail sales manager at Boka, said that the brand is currently the No. 2 toothpaste at Erewhon and No. 4 oral-care brand and the hope is that the smoothie will continue to strengthen sales. For Boka, the smoothie marks another way for the brand to boost awareness and innovate in the world of oral-care marketing, and the marketing team is working with LA influencers and holding activations at sororities and Pilates studios in the area to encourage people to try it, Butler said. There’s also a sampling element: for some members, each Mint Condition Smile Smoothie order comes with a travel-sized tube of Boka’s Ela Mint toothpaste.

“For us, this is a pay-to-play situation,” Butler said. “If somebody buys more of our toothpaste in store, that’s a great outcome for us, but we do not see any of the proceeds of this product.”

Mixed benefits

Branded drinks have spread beyond Erewhon, and other smoothie distributors like Pressed Juicery and Butterfield Market are collaborating with brands like Cowboy Colostrum and influencers like Acquired Style. But do they have the same cultural impact?

Antoci said Erewhon doesn’t do any marketing of its own, but the brand is active on social media and posts about its celebrity smoothies and membership drinks to its more than 650,000 Instagram and TikTok followers worldwide. Recently, pricey New York sports club Kith Ivy began selling $25 Erewhon smoothies in the city, officially making them bicoastal.

“The power of Erewhon is so much larger than the 10 stores they have in LA,” Butler said. “It’s a brand that people all across the country follow, people purchase from their online store all over the world, and so…it’s really a punch-above-your-weight type of partnership, beyond the door count and the number of SKUs in the store.”

Some brands, like Vacation sunscreen, have, after working with Erewhon on a membership drink, come back for seconds. Singh, Tellam, and Butler all said their brands would be happy to concoct another drink, with Tellam confirming another Salt & Stone smoothie is “in discussion and is potentially in the pipeline” for 2026.

“It’s been not only really a lot of fun, but I think it fits the brand in such an incredible way,” Butler said. “It fits the target audience, Erewhon’s been such a good partner, so I don’t see a reason why we would not want to do this in the future—assuming that it performs well.”