The Product
Naked Earth, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based wellness startup, has launched a line of ceremonial-grade cacao ritual packets aimed at consumers seeking sustained energy without the volatility associated with coffee. The product retails at $65 per box of six 35-gram servings — roughly $10.83 per serving — and is sold direct-to-consumer through the company's website, with wholesale accounts available on request.
Each single-serve squeeze pack combines ethically sourced cacao with MCT coconut oil, cardamom, rose, vanilla, sea salt and sunflower lecithin. The formula is certified organic, vegan, sugar-free and gluten-free. Packets can be prepared hot or iced, positioning the product across multiple consumption occasions. Co-founders Alyna and Elliot Rivera, who spent a year developing the recipe, cite stomach-friendliness as a key formulation priority — an explicit nod to a common friction point in the broader cacao category.
Market Context
The launch lands in a functional beverage segment experiencing significant consumer-driven momentum. A randomized, placebo-controlled trial published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology found that participants consuming high-dose cocoa polyphenols daily for 30 days reported meaningfully greater calmness and contentedness versus a placebo group — clinical language that operators and buyers in the better-for-you channel have come to expect from brands seeking shelf placement. The coffee-alternative niche, which includes adaptogenic drinks, mushroom-based beverages and now ceremonial cacao formats, has drawn mounting interest from specialty retail buyers and direct-to-consumer platforms alike.
Naked Earth's entry is direct-to-consumer only at launch, a positioning that limits near-term volume but preserves margin and brand control — a common early-stage strategy in the premium functional segment. The price point, at approximately $10.83 per serving, sits well above mass-market coffee but is competitive with premium café ceremonial cacao offerings, which frequently run $12 to $18 per prepared drink.
Supply Chain and Giving
Sourcing infrastructure represents a meaningful differentiator in the cacao category, where supply-chain transparency has become a baseline expectation among premium buyers. Naked Earth sources through direct-trade relationships with smallholder farms in Central America and Africa, describing the arrangement as "beyond fair trade." The company uses industrially biodegradable squeeze-pack packaging and donates $1 from every purchase to Ana Iris and the indigenous Boruca community in Costa Rica — a cause the founders connected with at a panel discussion in June 2025.
"We loved the way ceremonial cacao made us feel, and we wanted that feeling to be part of our everyday lives without sacrificing quality or ethics," said Elliot Rivera, co-founder of Naked Earth. "There was nothing on the market like what we were looking for, so we created it ourselves."
For trade buyers, the brand's clean-label credential stack — organic, vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, short ingredient list — mirrors what specialty grocers and foodservice wellness concepts have prioritized in recent better-for-you beverage sourcing decisions. Whether Naked Earth can convert that stack into wholesale distribution will depend on how quickly it builds trial and reorder data from its direct channel. The functional beverage category has proven that premium single-serve formats can scale from DTC into retail when the unit economics and brand story align — both of which Naked Earth is positioning as core assets.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
