Borjomi Expands Into U.S. Wellness Market

Georgian mineral-water brand Borjomi is making a broader push into the United States, moving beyond its traditional diaspora customer base and targeting mainstream American consumers through premium retail, e-commerce and wellness-focused marketing.

The 135-year-old brand is expanding into premium natural-food retail in New York and Los Angeles while also rolling out nationwide through Amazon. The move gives Borjomi a broader route into one of the world’s most competitive beverage markets.

What makes the expansion particularly interesting is not simply where Borjomi is selling. The company is repositioning itself for the American market around functional wellness — especially gut health — while retaining the distinctive mineral profile and heritage that made the brand well known across Eastern Europe and neighboring markets.

From heritage brand to functional beverage

Borjomi has been bottled since 1890 and comes from volcanic springs in Georgia’s Lesser Caucasus. Its water has a much stronger mineral profile than many bottled waters familiar to U.S. consumers, giving it a notably salty, alkaline taste.

In the United States, that difference is being turned into part of the proposition rather than softened. Borjomi is promoting the naturally occurring minerals and bicarbonates in its water and positioning the brand within the growing functional-beverage and gut-health conversation.

The strategy reflects a wider shift in American beverage consumption. Consumers are increasingly looking beyond basic hydration toward products associated with function, provenance, ingredients and wellness. That has created room for products with stronger identities — even when their taste profile is less neutral than conventional bottled water.

A different U.S. brand strategy

Borjomi’s American expansion is built around the campaign platform “For People With Guts,” developed to connect the brand’s mineral composition with a more contemporary, culturally relevant wellness message.

Rather than approaching gut health through clinical language, the campaign uses music, dance and lifestyle-oriented creative. Borjomi says the goal is to make the functional story around mineral water more accessible to mainstream American consumers.

That represents a meaningful change in how a heritage European brand presents itself abroad. In its home and traditional export markets, Borjomi already benefits from strong familiarity. In the U.S., the company has to explain both what the product is and why its unusual mineral profile matters.

The brand is also entering America with more than one product. Alongside its core sparkling mineral water, the U.S. portfolio includes Borjomi Aromati, a flavored sparkling mineral-water line, and Limonati by Borjomi, a natural sparkling lemonade.

Retail plus Amazon lowers the entry barrier

Borjomi is combining physical retail with national e-commerce rather than waiting for a full nationwide supermarket rollout.

Premium-store placements in New York and Los Angeles give the company access to consumers who are already more familiar with natural, imported and functional products. Amazon, meanwhile, gives Borjomi immediate nationwide availability without requiring complete physical retail coverage from day one.

For a European consumer brand entering the U.S., that combination can be strategically useful. It creates physical visibility in influential coastal markets while using e-commerce to test demand across the rest of the country.

Borjomi’s expansion is also supported by increased production capacity at home. In 2025, IDS Borjomi opened a new $120 million bottling plant in Georgia with an initial annual capacity of 750 million bottles and plans to reach one billion bottles by 2030. The company explicitly identified the United States as one of the international markets the investment would help support.

America as a global brand-building market

Borjomi’s management has described the U.S. as strategically important not only because of its size but because of its influence on global consumer trends.

The company says its research indicated strong American interest around gut health and functional beverages, giving Borjomi confidence that its natural mineral composition could provide a differentiated position in a crowded category.

That makes the expansion more ambitious than simply exporting additional bottles. Borjomi is attempting to use the American market to reshape how the brand is perceived internationally: less as a regional heritage product and more as a modern global wellness beverage.

What this means for European companies

Borjomi highlights a challenge that many established European consumer brands face when entering America: heritage alone is rarely enough.

A product that is already familiar at home often needs a new reason to matter to American consumers. In Borjomi’s case, the company is connecting its existing product characteristics — strong mineral content, natural sourcing and a distinctive taste — to an American consumer trend that is already growing.

Its market-entry strategy also shows how European brands can avoid choosing between traditional retail and direct-to-consumer distribution. Borjomi is using premium stores to establish credibility in selected markets while Amazon provides national reach.

Whether American consumers embrace Borjomi’s unusually strong taste at scale remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: instead of changing the product to resemble mainstream American water, Borjomi is betting that the characteristics that make it different can become the reason U.S. consumers try it.