Adina's bottled beverages boast globe-trotting origins.

In 2000, having built the Odwalla juice empire with a box of oranges, a $200 hand juicer, and a value system, only to see those values watered down to make a multi-million dollar deal with Coca-Cola Co. the year after he stepped down as CEO, Greg Steltenpohl got out of the juice game for good.

He soon hit the lecture circuit, hoping to share the lessons he’d learned at Odwalla, and hoping to inspire a new generation of business leaders to succeed where his generation had failed.

When an audience member at one of the lectures asked him for a few minutes of his time to talk about a juice business she wanted to start, Steltenpohl told her, “I’m not interested in sitting on any boards or anything. But okay, let’s have a conversation.”

Then Magatte Wade-Marchand told him her story. She had just returned home to Senegal after four years in France to discover that nearly all of her country’s traditional beverages were gone, replaced by Coca-Cola and Nescafe. She was particularly shocked to find that the national drink, a hibiscus and lemon blend traditionally given to guests as a sign of hospitality, was nowhere to be found.

“I’m a realist,” she told him, “and I know that Africans will not accept a new brand unless it comes from the West. So I want to make our traditional drinks here and make them under a brand that becomes so popular in America that it is eventually embraced by my own people.”

“There was a sort of perverse logic to what she was saying — like reverse colonialism, only get it right the second time or something,” Steltenpohl says, “… I thought, this is a story that will get me out of bed in the morning.”