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The Story Of Yaki Da
From poor mental health to eureka moments, the story of Yaki Da actually started with vegan leather.
YAKI DA
(JÆKI: DA - YAKEE-DAH)
Exclamation, Welsh: A drinking toast; good health; cheers.
Yaki Da is the anglicised and more easily readable translation of Welsh phrase "Iechyd Da".
What began as an idea to find a low cost side hustle quickly developed into a health and functional drinks company - using our entire savings to fund it.
'Where does vegan leather come into it?' I hear you ask, well, our original idea was selling vegan pet accessories and bringing our love for branding, design and photography to a fairly stale market.
No matter how many times I ran the numbers something didn't quite add up. We spent months looking at ways to make it work but just as all hope was lost for our low cost, low energy side hustle, co-founder Ellie had a Eureka moment.
We had both just switched from coffee and tea to matcha. We often experienced anxiety, jitters and caffeine crash so matcha was a much better way for us to get our energy with the added bonus of all it's other health benefits too.
We were getting frustrated lugging around a tin of matcha powder, a whisk, perhaps even a bowl to mix it in, when travelling or working. It wasn't practical and there must be countless matcha whisks and tins in lost property across the UK's hotels and trains from our collection.
That's where the idea of Yaki Da was born, to create a bottled matcha drink using ceremonial grade matcha that can be drunk neat or added to your choice of milk. The matcha market had several premixed oat matcha lattes or carbonated energy drinks but nothing as simple as what we envisaged.
Yaki Da Bottled Matcha is the first of our products but we hope to continue developing a considered offering of matcha, wellness and lifestyle products within our creative vision.