Green Bee Soda may have started as an experiment in Chris Kinkade’s kitchen, using ingredients from his fridge and a beekeeping hobby, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the company today.

Since starting in 2010 with one flavor – “Lemon Sting,” which features lemon and rosemary – Kinkade and his wife, Lori, have created a company that has been on an upward climb for more than 12 years. 

“Ever since then, we’ve just been kinda chasing demand,” Chris Kinkade said.

(Chris Kinkade founded Green Bee Soda with his wife, Lori, more than 10 years ago. Today, the couple runs the company out of a 5,000 square-foot space in Brunswick, including this room, which produces 10,000 bottles of soda and sparkling water a day. (Spectrum News/Sean Murphy)

Today, the company employs six full-time workers year-round, and two to three part-time workers in the summer, operating out of a 5,000-square-foot space in Brunswick. The company offers a line of five natural-ingredient sodas and three unsweetened sparkling waters.

They’ve sold more than a million bottles a year in 2,000 stores as far south as Georgia, including in big chains such as Hannaford and Whole Foods.

Despite the company’s growth, it has not compromised on its keep-it-simple recipe philosophy. Unlike other large soda companies, Green Bee doesn’t buy in flavored sugar syrups to pour into carbonated water. For the ginger in Green Bee’s Ginger Buzz soda, the company uses actual ginger, not unlike the ginger root one buys in the grocery store. They put it through a grinder and use the actual ginger pulp to flavor the soda.

For the company’s Honeycomb Cider soda, Chris Kinkade demonstrated where they get the cider flavor from, running a paddle through the top of a simmering vat of actual apple cider, bought from a local orchard. He will add a few spices, such as cinnamon – and nothing else – before combining it with carbonated water and honey.

“It’s a culinary approach to soda,” he said. “If you were going to make soda out of ingredients in your kitchen, how would you do it?”

(Chris Kinkade, co-founder of Green Bee Soda, stirs a simmering batch of real apple cider, which he uses to make the company's Honeycomb Cider soda. He only adds honey, carbonated water and spices such as cinnamon to the final product. (Spectrum News/Sean Murphy)

The enterprise may have sprung from an effort to make homemade soft drinks for the family, but the Kinkades going into business of some kind was perhaps inevitable. Chris Kinkade declined to say his age, but said he spent his younger years in Massachusetts and Connecticut, working in investment banking and technology.

Then one day in 2010, he walked away from his career and the Kinkades moved to Harpswell to be near extended family.

“I was just kinda tired of the rat race, and I wanted to do something else with my life,” he said.

At first, the family had no plan, aside from the backyard beekeeping Chris Kinkade took up as a hobby. Then, wanting a wholesome alternative to traditional soft drinks for their kids, Chris and Lori developed what became Lemon Sting, with ingredients in their kitchen and honey from their own hives as a sweetener – no sugar, no preservatives and, as Chris Kinkade said, “no garbage.” 

Their one flavor was such a hit at home, the family produced five cases of it and marched down to Morning Glory Natural Foods in Brunswick to inquire about selling the product. As a test, the store allowed the Kinkades to try hawking the sodas on the street out front to gauge demand. They sold all five cases in just two hours.

Lori Kinkade said she remembered strong public enthusiasm for the beverage. The product’s simplicity meant a short and surprisingly legible list of ingredients on the label.

“People were like, ‘I can read this!’” she recalled.

Lori Kinkade attributed the company’s early success to the appeal of a small, local business taking a simplistic approach to making something that tasted good. People, she said, responded to that.

“They were excited, I think it’s because it’s so surprising,” she said. “No one had ever done anything like that.”

Not that the journey since has been easy. The couple chuckles now at recalling Chris Kinkade literally loading up a van with cases of soda to go to major grocery store chains to pitch the product. Today, however, the company continues to build on its success, both outside of Maine and outside of New England.

“It’s funny,” Lori Kinkade said. “We’re not local to the South, but the people are nice, and they’re warm, and they’ve really got a sweet tooth.”

In fact, the company is thinking big, with its sights set on the Holy Grail of destinations: California. Widely regarded as the most competitive beverage market in the country, the Kinkades and Green Bee Soda would have their work cut out for them there. Nevertheless, the Kinkades are riding high off recent successes at national trade shows, so they are optimistic that the expansion they’ve enjoyed so far will only continue.

“It’s (gone) beyond selling in a local deli and natural foods store,” Chris Kinkade said.