‘Nothing left’: Kiss The Berry healthy acai bowl chain collapses amid falling sales and high costs

An acai bowls business started by a uni dropout and popular with health-conscious millennials has suddenly collapsed leaving “nothing left”.

An acai bowls business started by a uni dropout and popular with health-conscious millennials has collapsed.

Kiss The Berry, founded in 2013 by then 19-year-old Sarah Miller, was placed into liquidation on Tuesday.

The chain had stores at West End and South Bank in Brisbane and Burleigh Heads on the Gold Coast.

“I have decided to press pause on our Kiss The Berry journey,” Ms Miller told The Courier-Mail while not revealing the reason for the closure.

“This has been the biggest decision I have ever made and took a really long, emotional time to make. Thank you to everyone who has been a part of our journey, especially our team.”

Liquidator Mark Davidson from Pearce & Heers told news.com.au that he was “still getting figures” for how much money was owed to creditors, but “a lot of it is investors” who were unlikely to get anything back.

“There’s nothing left, to be honest,” he said.

“They put quite a bit of money into it just to keep it going. Unfortunately, it hasn’t brought to fruition to the idea they were hoping due to falling sales, high staff costs and rent. They’ve shut down all the stores. All the assets, the plant and equipment, was leased.”

Mr Davidson said all stores had ceased trading over the last three months and all staff entitlements had been paid. He said there were roughly four or five people employed at each store, mostly casuals.

“I suppose it’s a reflection of the economy,” he said.

“It’s not going gangbusters. It’s coming into summer, you’d think particularly on the Gold Coast eateries wouldn’t be going bust. This is their busy season, schoolies is on.”

Kiss The Berry founder Sarah Miller.

Ms Miller founded the business in 2013.

The chain had two Brisbane stores and one on the Gold Coast.

Ms Miller has been contacted for comment.

In 2017, she told Whimn that she first got the idea for the business while on a four-month break from her business degree because she was “really hating it and searching for something else”.

While in Texas she sampled her first acai bowl. “As soon as I had it, I thought that I had found an idea for a business,” she told the website.

“I started researching and realised that there weren’t many places other than juice bars that were doing it in Australia. I wanted to do it bigger, with more flavours, and just (make it) more exciting.”

She launched from a stall at Eagle Farm Markets before opening her first store.

In its first four years the business turned over $4.4 million and served more than 20,000 customers. In 2017 it turned over $2 million and employed about 60 people.

Mr Davidson said 2017 was “probably one of their better years”.

“Since 2017 it’s declined, not dramatically but a steady downward slope,” he said. “Unfortunately, it’s led to this position. The directors are obviously upset about it.”

In the Whimn interview, Ms Miller said she was “winging it” in the early days.

“Acai bowls are so labour intensive,” she said. “You need so much freezer storage and you need powerful blenders, so we couldn’t keep doing the market stall.”

She said she “didn’t even search around for the perfect site, I just signed the lease for where we did the pop-up store, and in hindsight it wasn’t the best decision”.

She admitted she had no real business plan.

“We were having fun, we were doing big beautiful bowls, I had no concept of portion control or wages or proper management, properly dealing with cash or anything like that,” she said.

Acai is a South American “superfood” that has exploded in popularity in recent years, particularly in the US.

But health experts have warned that acai bowls — usually made with a combination of frozen acai berry puree and other ingredients like fresh fruit, nuts and granola — are actually a “sugarbomb”.

“You should really look at acai bowls as more of an occasional treat, not something you’d have as a meal,” dietitian Ilana Muhlstein told Shape.

“Think of them as a replacement for ice cream. Acai bowls can have 50 grams of sugar (the equivalent of 12 teaspoons), or double what the American Heart Association recommends for women for an entire day.”

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