There is a moment, Shirley White recalls, that changed everything. It was 2017, and she was at her father’s 80th birthday — a celebration filled with music, community, and the kind of homemade Caribbean food and drink that belongs to no recipe book. Sorrel in reused plastic bottles. Ginger beer that had been brewed in someone’s kitchen. Flavours she had grown up with. Flavours, she noticed, that her father’s generation alone still knew how to make.

“I realised that the people who created the culture, the food, the beverages I had grown up with were getting older,” she says. “And they were taking it all with them.” That evening planted the seed of what would become OTC Beverages — a Wimbledon-based drinks company that is now turning heads across the British food and beverage industry, and well beyond.

OTC Beverages was incorporated in August 2018, but its spirit is considerably older. The company’s signature range — a non-alcoholic ginger beer, a vivid sorrel drink, and a Blue Butterfly Pea Flower and lime juice — draws on ingredients with deep roots in Caribbean and African culinary tradition: ginger and sugarcane from East Africa, sorrel and vanilla from across the Caribbean diaspora. Every bottle is made with 100% natural and organic extracts, cold-pressed to preserve vitamins, minerals, and enzymes at full potency.

The name itself carries layers. OTC stands for Original Traditional Concoctions — a nod to the authentic, time-honoured methods behind every recipe. It also references the fact that the drinks can be sold over the counter, a practical but quietly poetic ambition for a brand that began in a family kitchen. And then there is the personal dimension: O for Omari, T for Tyrone — Shirley’s two sons — and C for Corey, her nephew. This is, in every sense, a family business.

Shirley’s route to the drinks industry was anything but conventional. Before OTC, she spent thirty years in the City — Telerate, Deutsche Bank, HSBC — working her way through market data and investment banking. It is a background that might seem wholly removed from sorrel and sugarcane, but she is quick to draw the line between them. “It’s the skills you get from project management and juggling a number of programmes within large organisations,” she explains. “Networking. Asking the right questions. Doing your research. I used all of those skills to find the right people to work with and figure out how the packaging and bottle design would be perceived by the consumer.”

That forensic, City-trained attention to detail is visible in every aspect of OTC Beverages. The bottles are clean and considered. The ingredients list is short and legible. The flavour profiles are bold but precisely calibrated — a warmth from the ginger that builds without overwhelming, a tartness from the sorrel that is tempered by the sweetness of sugarcane and vanilla. These are not approximations. They are the product of considerable trial and error to get the factory recipes to match the memory of the original.

OTC Beverages arrives at a remarkable moment for the drinks industry. The no-and-low category has expanded faster than almost any other segment of the British market over the past five years, driven by a generation of consumers who are drinking less alcohol, reading ingredient labels, and reaching for flavour with purpose. In that context, a brand built on organic, functional, culturally rich beverages is not simply well-positioned — it is ahead of the curve.

The company’s shortlisting for the Great British Food Awards offered a signal of where industry opinion is moving. Retailers have taken note. OTC products are now stocked in takeaways and independent retailers across London, and the brand is building the kind of grassroots, community-led presence that many larger drinks companies spend millions trying to manufacture. With plans to bring OTC Beverages to America and Africa, Shirley White is thinking in terms of a global legacy — one bottle at a time.

“It’s at the age where you’re growing the brand,” she says. “You want it to be an identifiable brand of choice when people go to a shop to buy a cold drink.” On the evidence of what OTC Beverages has built so far, that moment may be closer than many expect.

OTC Beverages products are available online at otcbeverages.com and at independent retailers across London. Follow the brand’s journey on Instagram and social media.