At 6am on November 26th, our founder and CEO Tomás woke up to an urgent call from our facilities manager. He rushed to the site and couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Firefighters were tackling a massive blaze that had started in a neighboring unit and had already ravaged about half of our facilities. The only good news was that no-one was hurt. But at that moment, kencko’s future looked bleak. 

Over the course of that Sunday, news spread to the whole kencko team. Everyone wanted to do something to help. Once the firefighters had finished, we had a limited time to go into the portions of the building that were still standing and rescue everything that wasn’t destroyed.

The very next day, Tomás and key members of the Supply Chain team were on site with hard hats on, making sure anything that could be saved, was. (That’s Tomás on the left, on selfie duty and keeping everybody smiling as usual!)

And from there, it was a 24/7 effort to figure out how to get back to shipping smoothies. There were members, suppliers, and retail partners to connect with - we couldn’t have made it past this stage without you all! There was vital equipment to repair or replace. There were dry business-y things like forecasting and insurance to tend to. There was seemingly too much to do!

Basically, it felt like we needed to do a speedrun of the entire six year history of kencko - all the challenges and triumphs - in a matter of weeks. But we got to work.

By the time the holidays came around, we were ready for a break! We finally had the chance to come up for air and evaluate where things stood, and things looked…pretty good. All of our effort had gotten us to a place where we could actually envision relaunching soon. 

As the new year dawned, we celebrated a huge milestone when smoothies began rolling off the production line once again - a pretty incredible achievement, just six weeks after the fire. And the hunt for a new home was over: after viewing more than 30 potential sites we signed a lease on a new permanent facility - bigger and better than the last one.

So, what’s next? 

Well, we’re still working nonstop to restock smoothies and fruit snacks for you, with more manufacturing capacity coming online in the weeks to come. While the shop has been closed, we’ve also made a bunch of updates and improvements to our subscription service that we think you’ll love. We expect member orders to restart during February.

Expect more news in the next few weeks - and THANK YOU from the bottom of our hearts for supporting our company over the last two months. We love our members!