Tractor is the largest beverage company you’ve never heard of.
That’s by design, because Tractor Beverage Company likes to break the status quo.
After a decade of creating organic fountain beverages for universities and restaurants like Chipotle, Tractor is heading down a new fork in the road, now entering the traditional packaged goods space by launching a craft organic haymaker. It will be available at all Sprouts Farmers Market locations across the country.
It’s the opposite road most young beverage companies drive toward, particularly given that food service is not the ideal route to rev up a visible brand. But that’s a result of the Tractor mindset.
“We’re doing business as unusual, building Tractor in a way unlike any other company,” Tractor CEO Kevin Sherman tells me.
It’s molded deep into the screws that tighten the tractor; its original logo is a tractor with no seat. “It was this idea of the autonomous tractor, the future of beverage as opposed to just imitating others,” Tractor cofounder Justin Schneir tells me.
That future involves reviving a beverage synonymous with farming: the haymaker–the lively, bubbly liquid made with ginger and apple cider vinegar–known as the farmer’s tonic. But really, the haymaker and all beverages Tractor concocts are a vehicle, a tractor, to move the conversation of growing organic food, with the farmer front of mind, into a more soulful and grounded way of carrying our everyday lives.
“Everything we’re doing,” Sherman says, “always leads with having a major impact on our planet.”
Revving The Engine
“We always knew that we were more than just a beverage company,” Schneir says. “We wanted to dream the impossible.”
It sounds like Schneir and fellow cofounder Griffin Barkley had some overly-ambitious goals as if they’re working to cure cancer. Given the amount of farmers who lose their lives to the presumed effects of spraying toxic pesticides, in their own targeted sense, they are.
Schneir and Barkley have always been destined to be at the wheel of the tractor, until letting it go to drive autonomously. Schneir has been juicing his entire life. “My dad was a hippie who lived in a teepee up in a mountain. He was a fruitarian for two years, just living off fruit,” he says. “The first gift he ever gave me was an old Champion juicer.”
He entered the manufacturers insurance industry and was also on a Red Cross board, where he met his fellow board member and soon-to-be friend, who was also a competitor in the insurance industry. Barkley comes from a family that sold insurance to farmers.
Once the pair cooked up their sparkling organic agua fresca beverages with ingredients straight from grocery store shelves, in true Tractor fashion, the typical retail was not the route they felt confident driving down. “Big corporations make it impossible to penetrate those retail opportunities,” Barkley says. “We had to look at this in a very strategic and different way.”
They created syrups of their organic beverages that their accounts could then put into a bubbler and carbonate into the agua fresca refreshers alongside fountain drinks. “The converters to the nozzles would break, and there’d be syrup all in the back kitchen,” Schneir says. “Everything about it was messy.” Their first account was a pizza shop in Colorado which was looking for a beverage option to elevate their menu.
A few years later, Tractor’s most flavorful opportunity arose when they were introduced to Chipotle. One of Chipotle’s executive chefs joined Tractor’s advisory board to help broker the deal. Chipotle then invested in the brand and installed its bubblers, in flavors like Watermelon Limeade and Mandarin Cardamom, in all of its now nearly 4,000 restaurants. Tractor’s bubbler refreshers are now found in 10,000 total food service locations.
“They told us they’d been looking for something like Tractor for a long time,” Barkley says. “In a sense,” Schneir adds, “we reminded them of who they were.”
Soil And Soul
While the Chipotle partnership provided Tractor an economic foundation, most people don’t associate Tractor with the beverage they’re sipping alongside their burrito bowls with extra guac. The Tractor brand has barely had any public visibility, something most companies would reject. But as Tractor’s Head of Brand and Product, Duke Stump likes to say, “Our adversary is the quiet seduction of the status quo.”
That ethos has not changed in ten years, and Tractor doubled down on it several years ago when hiring the most reluctant of CEOs: a teacher. “When people want to talk about Tractor,” Stump says, “I always say, ‘Let me tell you about Kevin.’”
The son of Cuban immigrants, Tractor CEO Kevin Sherman once lived on an Apache reservation in New Mexico to teach Indigenous tribes. That’s where he fell in love with education before becoming a Principal in Los Angeles’ South Central neighborhood. Sherman’s lived experience as an educator has provided certain leadership skills that make Tractor a business inspired not by business itself, but something greater–something spiritual, something unusual, something rooted in soil and soul.
“I spent some summers in Uganda and Tanzania building teacher training programs for girls,” Sherman explains. “I felt like I was in the presence of a higher form of humanity because of the way that they treated one another…When you have a grateful heart, it unlocks so much fear.”
This is the type of leadership that has guided Tractor into its new era of aligning even deeper with moving the organic movement forward through beverage. “We had these beautiful intentions to bring hope to the world and use this platform to tell a broader story of regeneration and supporting farmers,” Barkley says. “It has evolved over the last ten years and continues to get more crystallized.”
The health of our soil, the root of all that provides life and sustenance, is a far overlooked component of producing healthy food and improving planetary health. Spraying our crops hurts the soil, thus our bodies. “Everyone deserves organic despite socioeconomic status,” Sherman says. “We should be fighting with all of our might that every single person should be getting organic opportunities.”
It plays into Tractor’s Organic Impact Tracker, which measures the impact from drinking one Tractor beverage, including carbon emissions avoided, water saved, organic land supported, and synthetic pesticides removed from the food chain. “The more beverages we sell,” he explains, “the more we have a direct effect on the soil.”
The OG Gatorade
Schneir and Barkley knew the day would come that they would be able to finally branch out to create their haymaker, texting Sherman late at night about a year ago feeling that the time finally felt right. He texted back, “let’s do it.”
Haymaker, sometimes referred to as ‘switchel,’ is believed to date back to the 17th century, where Barbadian sugarcane farmers would drink the elixir for energy out in the fields. It’s why many consider it the ‘OG Gatorade.’ It is made with ginger juice and apple cider vinegar, sweetened with apple juice and molasses. Tractor has four flavors of its haymaker: Citrus, Dragon Berry, Passion Mango and Apricot Peach.
Tractor’s haymaker, made simply of organic ingredients from the earth, launched in September 2025 at Farm Aid 40 in Minneapolis, where its ochre Airstream made a stop on its Mad Farmer tour, one of Tractor’s initiatives to stop by farms across the country to understand farmers’ lives more comprehensively.
That ochre, or copper color, matches the cans themselves, printed in the tall, rustic cans and wrapped in a thick, textured parchment paper, with cursive writing throughout, resembling a farmer’s journal. “The handwritten element is a big part of our brand,” Stump says. “It was inspired by Darwin’s field notes.” The design was led by Alex Center and his Center Design.
That farmer’s journal is also part of the inspiration behind Tractor Beam, a media venture which gives writers and artists a voice to go against the conventional grain–against the status quo–and imagine what life could be like if we all embraced the life sprouted from the soil.
Sprouting From The Soil
Tractor now has a new vehicle–retail shelves–to drive the mission in a way it never has, entering all 400 plus Sprouts Farmers Market locations on January 1.
With brand visibility largely absent for the past decade, Tractor’s mission of getting organic products in as many homes as possible can access a larger megaphone. “Haymaker is the Trojan horse of the brand,” Stump says. “Now people get to see, feel, and touch this thing called Tractor in a different way.” That reach will be facilitated further as Sprouts plans to open hundreds more stores in all corners of the country.
“We want to provide our customers with something brand new to discover,” Sprouts’ Chief Forager Kim Coffin tells me. “With Tractor’s success in food service, we feel confident driving our customers looking for new, innovative products to Tractor.”
Haymaker is not a soda, not a non-alcoholic beverage, not a functional beverage, not a juice–its a haymaker, a product that’s elusive in our modern grocery stores. Haymaker does not fit into any grocery category, in the same vein as Tractor forging its own path in business. Through March, Tractor will have its own endcap display at Sprouts that will help educate the consumer about the haymaker. It will then find a home in Sprouts’ Functional Tonic set. “Consumers are demanding more and more functional beverages,” Coffin says. “We see this as an opportunity to innovate with Tractor for the long term in a mutually beneficial partnership.”
“Haymaker can be your non-alc option at a concert. It also can be the option that you just want throughout the day sitting in your office drinking, with friends hanging out,” Stump explains. “The versatility is pretty astounding…We’re outsiders standing at the edge of the familiar.”
For now, Tractor’s haymaker will be sold in retail primarily at Sprouts locations along with live events produced by AEG Worldwide. These committed relationships formed on aligned values is more important to Tractor than any specific retail shelf itself. “I don’t think we would have gone into retail if we did not have that relationship,” Sherman says.
Tractor’s Compass
Tractor is a member of 1% for the Planet, the organization whose brands commit 1% of its annual sales to environmental causes. Some refer to it as the ‘earth tax.’
For Tractor, that 1% goes to the Farmhand Foundation, which Tractor helped form in 2022. “You can’t talk about Tractor without talking about Farmhand,” says Sherman.
Whitney Clapper is the Cofounder and Executive Director of the Farmhand Foundation, which works to give a voice to farmers, provide a helping hand on their farms, physically or with grants and paperwork, and ultimately helps transition them to organic or regenerative farming practices. “We fill the hope gap by supporting farmers,” Clapper tells me. “It starts with listening.”
Clapper has organized a listening tour, beginning with calling farmers simply to understand their livelihoods–from the humble love of the work to the pain points. “We’ve made it a point to learn from farmers first to know how best to approach them,” she says. “My first question to them is not, ‘How do you farm?’ and ‘Why do you spray?’ which is what they’re used to being asked. My first question is, ‘Can I buy you a cup of coffee?’”
Sometimes farmers don’t take her calls, and that’s ok. Sometimes they’re not interested in transitioning from spraying pesticides, because they feel it would be too difficult and cost-prohibitive. That’s ok, Clapper believes, too. “Conventional farmers are so used to being accused by outsiders…but the way we’re approaching them is neutral,” Clapper says. “We want to help every farmer do a little bit better every single day.”
The Farmhand Foundation primarily targets farms in Southern California, intentionally starting local. “We want to get it right here first,” Clapper says. “Small actions loom large.”
Sometimes, what a farmer needs is someone to buy their crops. Farmhand helps find a market for them, including directly sourcing to Tractor on some occasions, other times supplying the nutrient-dense food to nearby schools.
It takes several years to transition a conventional farm to organic, and several more to regenerative organic. The Farmhand Foundation is at the early stages of seeing its work manifest, on track to see a couple hundred acres transitioned. “The Farmhand Foundation is our compass,” says Schneir.
“You can be a purpose-driven company and also thrive economically,” Sherman says. “Just don’t lose sight of your purpose, because the purpose will drive the revenue.”
Now that Tractor’s haymaker is out in the world, it can finally start to cement the legacy it has been working on since day one. “We want people to really understand what soil & soul means,” Schneir says. “Soil–being the foundation of life–and soul–being the foundation of living.”