Eldie Gummies Make Elderberry Benefits Portable
Carmel Berry Company Founder Katie Reneker Launches Line of Immunity-Boosting Treats
The Carmel Berry elderberry product line | Photo: Courtesy
A pioneer of the elderberry supplement business in California, Katie Reneker started her Monterey County–based company Carmel Berry back in 2015, initially as a means of warding off the schoolhouse illnesses her young kids were bringing home. You may remember her from my December 2023 article about the nascent effort to develop elderberry farms in Santa Barbara and elsewhere, in which she described how her home remedy from native plants grew into a substantial concern producing various wellness and culinary products.
Eldie Gummies are her latest creation, a concentrated, chewy supplement whose direct-from-farm potency is palpable but balanced by fruit and honey. And it was all inspired by the desire to have real elderberry immune-boosting power while on the road.
“The gummies came out of a travel necessity!” she said. “Traveling with liquid elderberry syrup is a logistical challenge, and gummies are durable and portable.”
But when you read the ingredients on many of the existing brands, Reneker explained, “Here’s what you’ll find: sugar, more sugar, mysterious ‘natural flavoring’ — and microscopic levels of actual elderberry.”
It’s also very hard to tell how much actual elderberry is in other products. “Unless a brand explains their fresh fruit equivalence, there is no way to know how much is truly in their product,” she said. “Is a concentrate a 4:1 concentrate or a 40:1 concentrate? Over 90 percent of elderberry gummies we examined do not list this equivalence. It is impossible to truly know how much elderberry per serving.”
The solution was making it for herself, which is how she started Carmel Berry in the first place. “Since we use fresh elderberry juice and freeze-dried juice powder, we know exactly how much we have per serving,” said Reneker. Eldies have 3,900mg of elderberry per two-gummy serving; 40 gummies come in each $30 bag.
And those berries are all grown in the United States, rather than imported from Europe and elsewhere, which is the norm. “We are the only elderberry gummy out there that has truly healthy sweeteners, and high levels of elderberry, and sources our elderberries from American farmers,” said Reneker. “Now we’ve got convenience without compromise: high potency, excellent sweeteners, and careful sourcing of our berries!”
See carmelberry.com.
