De La Calle: The Tepache Brand That Rebuilt Its Own Door

Somewhere in a produce market in Mexico City, a vendor scooped fermented pineapple out of a wooden barrel, poured it into a plastic bag, wrapped a rubber band around a straw, and handed it to a British graphic designer who had never heard of it.

Alex Matthews drank it. Then he watched the vendor hand the next bag to a middle-aged man, and the one after that to a family with kids.

That is the detail he keeps returning to. Not the flavor. The line. Everybody was drinking this thing. Old men, children, workers on a break. It was not a health product or a craft product or a lifestyle. It was just what you drank.

Six years later De La Calle is in more than 10,000 American stores, and the most interesting thing about the company is not how it grew. It is that in 2024, the CEO stood up and said publicly that he had been selling it to the wrong people.

What tepache actually is

Say it teh-PAH-che.

The word descends from the Nahuatl tepiātl, which the Aztecs and Toltecs used for a fermented drink made from corn, not pineapple. Pineapple arrived later, traded up through Central America, and the modern form took hold: pineapple, pineapple rinds, cinnamon, sugar, left to ferment.

There is no master recipe. There are thousands. Cloves, aniseed, black pepper, mango, orange, pomelo, lime, banana. Every family kitchen, every tepachería, every street stall runs its own version. Rafael Martin del Campo learned his from his grandmother, who learned hers from her grandmother.

He is a third-generation tepache maker. He also studied culinary arts and food science, which is an unusual combination, and it is why he ended up as the co-founder responsible for figuring out how to ferment tepache at industrial scale without turning it into something else.

Matthews brought the other half. He had spent 2000 onward in California building HERE Studio, a branding agency, and had helped shape Kevita kombucha and Forager. He knew CPG. Rafa knew fermentation. De La Calle launched in 2021, backed a year later by $7 million from KarpReilly, with HERE Studio and the co-packer DrinkPAK joining the round.

The alcohol question

Traditional tepache is lightly alcoholic. Fermentation makes alcohol. That is what fermentation does.

De La Calle's version is not. Alcohol produced during fermentation is extracted during production, leaving behind lactic acid and the flavor compounds. The finished can is zero ABV, which is the reason a tepache brand sits on a soda shelf in America rather than behind a counter.

Worth pausing on that, because it is the technical achievement underneath the whole company. Rafa did not make a low-alcohol drink. He made a fermented drink with the alcohol taken back out, at scale, without the result tasting like a compromise.

What is in the can

Here is the current ingredient list for Spiced Pineapple, the flagship:

Nearly all of it certified organic. The company's own comparison is that it carries roughly eight times less sugar than a conventional Mexican soda like Jarritos.

Three things in that list deserve to be named plainly rather than glossed.

The fiber is added. Acacia gum and agave inulin are prebiotic fibers. They are not native to tepache. Nine grams is a real amount, and it is the same structural move Olipop and Poppi made. If you are sensitive to inulin, you will know it.

The vitamin C is added. Ascorbic acid, not pineapple. Fortification, which is common and legal, but not the same as a fruit being naturally rich in something.

The sweetener is erythritol. This one requires more than a sentence.

The erythritol question, handled honestly

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol. The FDA classifies it as generally recognized as safe, and it is in an enormous share of the better-for-you beverage aisle.

It is also the subject of a serious and growing body of research out of the Cleveland Clinic. A 2023 study in Nature Medicine, led by Dr. Stanley Hazen, found elevated blood erythritol associated with cardiovascular events across cohorts totaling roughly 4,000 people. A follow-up intervention study published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology in August 2024 found that consuming erythritol made platelets more reactive in healthy volunteers, an effect glucose did not produce. The same group reported similar findings for xylitol in the European Heart Journal. Hazen's team has said the ingredient should be reevaluated by regulators.

It is not settled. A 2025 Mendelian randomization study concluded the long-term cardiometabolic picture remains debated, and correlation studies of blood metabolites are genuinely hard to interpret.

The pivot

Now the part that makes this company worth writing about.

De La Calle grew fast out of the gate. Better than 100% year over year for the first few years, on the strength of Whole Foods, which took a bet on tepache in 2021. Erewhon. Bristol Farms. Upscale foodservice. The natural channel embraced it, and the brand priced accordingly.

By late 2023, Matthews looked at where the drink had landed and did not like the shape of it.

De La Calle had been positioned and marketed, in his own assessment, primarily to white consumers, in premium natural-channel stores, in neighborhoods without large Hispanic populations. Three problems, one solution. Get away from the kombucha adjacency. Reach the Latino market. Stop apologizing for being a soda.

In 2024 the brand relaunched as a Modern Mexican Soda. New can art. New copy. And the price cut that proved it was real:

Marketing moved to TikTok, in English and Spanish, where growth was outstripping Instagram ten to one, and where De La Calle started featuring taquerías and independent restaurants it liked rather than its own product. Wrapped trucks went out across Southern California with messaging in both languages. The retail push moved toward Hispanic grocery chains, independents, and restaurants.

Matthews told BevNET that De La Calle was the largest ready-to-drink tepache brand in the country, then added the honest half: that only makes it a large fish in a very small pond.

Read that sequence again. A founder discovered his brand had built the wrong front door, said so on the record to a trade publication, cut his own price, and rebuilt. That is rarer than any flavor innovation in this category.

The fútbol can

The pivot has a sequel, and it is on shelves right now.

On May 6, 2026, De La Calle released the Mandarin Celebration can. Same Mandarin Refresco inside. Entirely new artwork, built around fútbol, and timed to the tournament being played across North America this summer. It marks forty years since Mexico last hosted, in 1986.

Matthews, who grew up in Europe watching the World Cup, signed his statement about it Viva Mexico y Viva De La Calle.

It sold out online almost immediately. It is still findable at Whole Foods, Target, Albertsons, Bristol Farms, Giant, and Save Mart, for as long as it lasts.

Notice what the can is for. Not the gym. Not the wellness aisle. Watch parties, backyards, and street celebrations. A drink you hand to a middle-aged man and then to a family with kids.

Six years and one very public course correction later, De La Calle sells the thing Matthews actually saw in that market.

Where to find it

More than 10,000 stores, including Target, Walmart, Whole Foods, and select Kroger and Albertsons banners. Seven core flavors: Spiced Pineapple, Mango Chili, Mandarin Refresco, Grapefruit Lime, Prickly Pear, Tropical Ponche, and Strawberry Citrus, which arrived in March 2026.

Direct from delacalle.mx, and wholesale through Faire and Airgoods.

And if you find a Mandarin Celebration can this summer, that is the whole story compressed into twelve ounces: an ancient street drink, a Mexican tournament forty years gone, and a brand that finally figured out who it was talking to.