Ryl Tea Grew 157 Percent While the Tea Category Shrank

The Ryl Company closed a $20 million Series C growth equity round on June 2, led by Purchase Capital through its Ryl Growth Partners SPV. The round follows a $15 million Series B in April 2025 and a $7.5 million Series A in early 2024, and brings the total growth equity raised across its rounds to roughly $50 million. For a Bentonville audience, the fact that matters most is where the cans already sit. Ryl’s core single-serve flavors, including Morgan Wallen Sweet Tea, Peaches n’ Cream, and Rocket Pop, are stocked in Walmart grocery, SNAP EBT eligible, and carrying a $1.77 rollback.

The raise comes down to one contrast. According to Circana figures the company cited, Ryl grew 157 percent year over year while the broader canned and bottled tea category, worth roughly $4.5 billion, declined 1.8 percent over the same period. The company argues that emerging tea brands are now adding more dollar growth than legacy brands are losing, which it reads as the tea aisle reaching the better-for-you turn that already reshaped soda, energy, and hydration. Ready-to-drink tea reaches roughly 81 percent of U.S. households by the company’s figures, but its buyers skew older, and the pitch is that zero-sugar formulas and functional ingredients can pull Gen Z and Millennial drinkers, particularly women, into a set they have been walking past.

A Refugee Family’s Tea Ritual Became a Beverage Company

Founder and CEO Blodin Ukella traces Ryl to a childhood habit. His family fled Kosovo for New Jersey in 1999 during the war, and tea, çaj in Albanian, was the household’s daily ritual and home remedy. Ukella studied at Rutgers, worked as a data analyst at Bai Brands, then ran strategy as chief strategy officer at the protein brand OWYN, later acquired by Simply Good Foods. He started Ryl in 2022 on the premise that most American iced tea was loaded with sugar or artificial ingredients, and that a clean, functional version could bring a younger shopper into a category built decades ago. Ryl’s cans carry fewer than five calories, tea polyphenols, and vitamin C, sweetened with stevia and monk fruit. “Our mission is to bring a new generation of consumers into the tea aisle,” Ukella said.

The brand’s early backing came from an unusual place for a wellness beverage. Country star Morgan Wallen, who has tied his taste for sweet tea to his East Tennessee childhood, signed on as an investor and brand ambassador in 2023, a relationship that produced the exclusive Wallen’s Sweet Tea line and gave Ryl a Southern, nostalgic anchor in a can. Wallen was not alone. The investor roster leaned heavily into Nashville, including Big Loud’s Seth England, Austin Neal of Sticks Management, and Get Engaged Media’s Cam Fordham. That network helps explain why a New Jersey tea startup leads with sweet tea and a country headliner. The Series C marks a shift in the pattern, with the institutional family office Purchase Capital leading the round rather than the music-industry circle that backed its early rounds.

The Real Asset Is the Distribution, Not the Can

What separates Ryl from the long list of better-for-you beverages chasing the same shopper is route to market. Over the past two years the company built a national direct store delivery network, the infrastructure that decides whether a brand can compete for shelf space, merchandising, and in-store execution rather than just show up in search results. Most emerging beverage companies never clear that bar. The Series C is aimed squarely at pushing that distribution harder, with proceeds earmarked for retail and DSD expansion into mass and club channels and a product pipeline slated for early 2027. The ambition is not new. When it raised its Series B, the company said the capital would put Ryl into more than 40,000 stores by the end of 2025, naming Walmart, Kroger, Costco, and Publix among others, and grow the team from nine employees in 2023 to more than 100.

The innovation engine has leaned on names shoppers already recognize. Ryl recently signed a multi-year licensing deal with The Hershey Company to build zero-sugar iced teas inspired by Jolly Rancher, starting with blue raspberry and green apple, on top of a lineup that already runs from Half and Half to Rocket Pop to an unsweetened black tea. The throughline with the Wallen partnership is the same, borrowing a familiar flavor or face to pull a younger, impulse-driven shopper toward a tea they might otherwise skip.

For Walmart suppliers, the detail worth holding onto is that Ryl is not a Marketplace-only curiosity. Its core flavors read as first-party grocery items, SNAP EBT eligible and available for same-day pickup and delivery rather than shipped by a third-party seller, which is a harder placement for a challenger to earn. The Hershey arrangement is a license, not an acquisition, and Wallen is an investor rather than an owner, so Ryl stays independent rather than a brand folded into a larger portfolio.

Purchase Capital has positioned modern tea as one of the more attractive growth segments in beverage, and founder and managing partner Nicholas Singer said Ryl is built to lead it. Co-chairman Leigh Feuerstein credited the team’s work earning retailer trust, building the DSD network, and signing Hershey. The open question is whether $50 million and a national truck route can turn a fast-growing single-serve business into the multipack and club presence legacy tea brands have held for decades, and the company says the products meant to make that case arrive in early 2027.

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