The Chai Box Chai Goes Viral After Launching At Costco

You know that moment when a supreme sense of pride washes over you and fills you up to the point you may burst? Well that is what is happening right now for Monica Sunny, founder/owner of The Chai Box. A family company that is rooted in ritual and pride of culture has hit the shelves of Costco, America’s favorite big box warehouse.

This is far from a just-another-product-hitting-grocery-shelves scenario. And, this is not a story of mere invention meets creativity meets ingenuity meets smart business. The emotion viewers witness in the posted videos of Sunny as she walks into Costco and sees the pallets of her chai piled high in a big American store surrounded by her three boys goes well beyond just business.

Sunny moved to Atlanta with her family from India when she was just nine years old. Bullied for being different and not fitting in, she at least found solace in the warm cups of chai her parents or grandparents had waiting for her when returning from school. Flash forward several years later, still in Atlanta, but with her husband and three boys, this ritual would become a deeply-rooted essential exercise not only instilled in her sons, but something her community supported, and now the rest of the country craves.

There’s chai and then there’s The Chai Box chai. Sure, you can get a quick syrupy sweet dose or watered down version at beverage shops or in other packaged brands, but the labor of love that goes into every bottle of The Chai Box chai is as if it was created for you at the stove, while stirring every chosen spice blend into boiling water then milk, just as Sunny shows (almost daily) in her mesmerizing “Cha” meditation videos on her social media channels. The spices come directly from their farm in Kerala, India and are hand selected to create blends with unforgettable aromas and tastes that are unlike other products that merely hint at spice, catering to what some may call a milder, American palate.

Not this chai. This is the bold, spicy Indian chai Sunny grew up with; it is the chai she’s made for twenty years now with her boys and husband; and it is the chai that got the attention of Oprah and her favorite things list 0f 2021, the Oscars swag bag of 2022, and now the shelves of Costco. And guess what? It has barely been on the shelves in and around Los Angeles for three weeks, and people are clamoring for more. “We saw sales go up the very day it launched!” Sunny said in a recent interview about the launch. She and her family actually made their way by car and in person to 11 of the 21 stores that now carry the bottles throughout Southern California.

“I hope you are in my London store”; “Are you in Canada?” “When are will you be in New Jersey?”; “Looking for some here in Australia”; “I’d love some in Florida”; and on and on go the online comments upon the September 20 launch of the bottled concentrate. In the store on opening day other comments from shoppers, like “I can taste all the spices,” or “It takes like home” added to the emotion for Sunny and her family, and the momentous occasion.

Sunny and her family and the staff of The Chai Box spent the entire summer preparing for the launch. At their small manufacturing house in Atlanta, they brewed, cleaned, bottled, brewed again, then packaged 30,000 bottles to be picked up by Costco trucks the week before the launch. “We learned from our experience with the Oprah Favorite Things list,” Sunny noted. That was in 2021 when they were still a basement operation and needed what felt like an army of friends, family, and neighbors to get them operational and ready for such a large order and the tsunami of orders that followed the highly publicized release of Oprah’s list.

“We still make everything in house,” Sunny said. “We source the spices, brew, taste, then bottle everything ourselves.” For the better part of three months, The Chai Box worked tirelessly from 3am to well into the night, steeping in the kettles all morning, then bottling all afternoon. Then the kettles had to be cleaned before each new brew, and the steeped tea gets turned into mulch, which is then picked up and delivered to farms throughout Georgia, something that follows the company’s mission to be a zero-waste entity.

Other notables have chimed in about The Chai Box chai, giving it not only more of a voice and a platform, but street cred, so to speak, from people we trust to tell us what’s what. Neha Tandon of Food & Wine said that The Chai Box chai “is the only one I keep returning to,” in a recent “Essentials” list published in late September. And, podcaster, personality Kendall Kyndall recently posted a video trying the The Chai Box chai concentrate for the first time and stopped in his tracks before mentioning how good it was and how it took him back to the moment he first tried a chai he liked in Napa two years ago.

Although the launch is now under their belts and their day-to-day operations aren’t at the same intense level they were at amidst preparation for the Costco pick-up, Sunny does hope the launch leads to more orders and to more locations across the country.

In the meantime, Sunny and her family are kicking off a series of Diwali celebrations this weekend, leading up to the official international celebration between October 31 and November 1. In 2023, Sunny had the opportunity to share The Chai Box chai at a Diwali celebration with Vice President, now Presidential nominee, Kamala Harris. “It was a privilege to share this moment with my three boys,” she said. “They have been part of the journey since day one.”

Costco began in 1976 in Washington, first known as Price Club, and as a place to purchase and stock up on items like paper products. Now, in 2024, to see products like a Southeast Asian chai alongside everything else, standing tall and proud for all shoppers to see, and not cast aside amidst a “specialty” aisle, is a giant leap for the company; it not only makes a statement about business practices and consumerism, but it better reflects who we are right now as a country, and it is most certainly something to celebrate.