Passion.

Passion. Ambition without passion fails every time. New Leaf was founded because I was passionate about creating a healthy, all natural beverage that also tasted great. I was so passionate about it, in fact, that I formulated the original recipes for the flavors you know and love today, in my personal kitchen, with my wife.  Then I hand designed a bottle and took my sketches to an engineer who fine-tuned those sketches into what you are now drinking your tea out of as you read this blog.

The passion only grew from there.

When you walk into the main New Leaf office in New Jersey, the passion permeates the air.  From our chief officers who are in meetings way before 9AM and who don’t get finish their days until after dinnertime, to our sales assistant who diligently organizes all of the distribution contracts and mass samplings, to our operations team, who not only make sure that packaging, bottling and distributing run smoothly, but also that our office does as well.  Everyone wears many hats here. There’s no task too big or too small for any one person to attend to, if it will drive the success of our brand.

And then, we have our sales team.  Our foot soldiers, who pound the pavement every day, across the country, securing retail space, ensuring quality distribution, being the face of the company to each and every person s/he interacts with during their day. It is their passion, their personality and their drive that ultimately determine the success of New Leaf Brands.

And what a passionate group they are!  You can’t do what they do and NOT be passionate, it just doesn’t work. All you have to do is sit through 15 minutes of a sales meeting and you start to see the passion come through: excitement over new products and POS, determination to fight for shelf space, elation over secured media coverage, tenacity to make New Leaf available to as many people as possible. We have brand ambassadors who work every day sampling across the NY metro area, introducing consumers to New Leaf teas and lemonades and generating consumer-focused video to populate our You Tube channel.

This is a family, and we live, eat and breathe New Leaf together, passionately nurturing a brand that we feverishly believe in.

Last, but not least, we have our fans.  True fans of New Leaf’s iced teas and lemonades are a very vocal, very passionate group. They truly believe, as we do, that New Leaf beverages are the very best on the market. There’s an old saying in consumer-driven business: Bad news spreads faster than good news. Meaning: A discontent customer will tell more individuals about their unsatisfactory experience than a satisfied customer will tell about their positive experience. In all my years in the beverage industry, I have found this to be the case. Until I founded New Leaf. Ever since consumers have been able to get their hands on the product, I have received letter after letter of positive feedback. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at our Facebook page and the “About You” page on this very site.

Passion is hard to contain.  In fact, true passion uncontainable. It continues to grow and grow, until it encompasses everything around it, just like New Leaf eventually will, as long as we all continue to nurture our passion, letting it grow and sharing The Official Beverage of Taste™ with others around us. Until, one day, when we can all sit down together and share a nice cold New Leaf. 

Eric Skae

Founder and CEO