Turning an ancient grain into a fresh new drink.
Barley.
Our founder, Jiali Jiang, is the genius behind Hi Barlee. She grew up surrounded by barley in Aba, a region of China close to Tibet. Barley has played an important part in Tibetan culture for centuries. The people there live at high altitude, which limits the types of foods that can be grown – many can’t survive.
But not barley. This ancient grain is made of stronger stuff.
Jiali moved to the UK to study at Cambridge University. She saw that barley was also locally grown in Britain but had slipped off people’s nutritional radar. It was an underused superfood hiding right under our noses.
Jiali set out on a mission to make it easy (and tasty!) for people to soak up all of barley’s brilliant benefits. But how could Jiali breathe new life into this forgotten ancient grain?
How could she bring barley back?…
…by whipping up the freshest dairy free barley-based drink on the market.
From Ancient Tibet to the supermarket shelves. Jiali has brought barley back.
TIMELINE
2016
Bright Barley was registered in Buckinghamshire, UK in 2016. Using the advanced technology in the British food and beverage industry, we focused on building an innovative dairy-free brand based on barley. Using British organic barley as the raw material to produce healthy and environmentally friendly plant-based drinks.
2020
Within a year after the launch, Bright Barley signed cooperation agreements with the two largest health food distributors in the UK, The Health Store and Tree of Life, and entered more than a hundred health food stores, convenience stores, high-end supermarket chains (such as Eat17) in London and was exported to Qatar and Israel.
At the same time, we cooperated with online supermarkets such as Yumbles, the Food Market, and the Vegan Kind. We won the World Beverage Innovation Awards for Best Plant-based Drink and was nominated for the World Plant-based Awards and Great British Food Awards in the UK.
2021
We established the Hi BARLEE brand，and launched in the Chinese market. We selected high-quality barley on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and made it into healthy and nutritious plant-based drinks. There are many flavors such as black sesame, walnut, barley grass, etc. The drinks are high in calcium and dietary fiber, which helps to solve the problem of dietary imbalance of urban residents today.
This is barley – reinvented.
Ancient grain, new drink.
