To close out the year, GQ is revisiting the most fascinating ideas, trends, people, and projects of 2023. For all of our year-end coverage, click here.
When I visited Los Angeles last year, I had two activities on my to-do list: I wanted to visit Joshua Tree, and I wanted my friend Shira to drive me to the Silver Lake Erewhon so I could spend $17 on Hailey Bieber’s TikTok-viral “Strawberry Skin Glaze” smoothie.
Now, I like smoothies, and I dig a localized grocery store, but most of all, I love a collective experience. Participating in a pop-culture-adjacent food trend is, to me, a holy form of nourishment, insofar as it is an opportunity to commune with my species, to feel one with existence, right here, right now, in this singular moment on Earth. This sort of spiritual intimacy is not exactly the food-based enlightenment that a trendy grocer like Erewhon nominally peddles in, but then again, it sort of is: As Isabel Ling wrote for Mold magazine earlier this year, “A big part of [Erewhon]’s allure lies in its ability to facilitate connection amongst its clientele, the idea (not dissimilar to the original teachings of macrobiotics) being that if you are what you eat, and we’re both eating organic roasted almond butter from a mason jar, we must have something in common.”
This particular beverage, the Strawberry Skin Glaze smoothie, launched in tandem with Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode in 2022. Online, the drink quickly ascended to the mythical—a swirly pink symbol of impossible beauty, hype, luxury, and unattainable wellness. And I needed to know what it tasted like.
After placing my order and waiting 15 minutes or so, I held the Hailey Bieber smoothie in my hands like an art object. Inside the plastic cup was an earthy pink, streaked with snowy coconut cream and jam-red strawberry sauce. Each 20-ounce drink contains a dozen ingredients, many of them name-brand products also sold at the store: Malk almond milk, Neocell hyaluronic acid drops, Vital Proteins collagen powder. (Brands pay an inclusion fee for their ingredient to get name-checked in an Erewhon smoothie.) The strawberries are Harry’s Berries, which hail from a cult-favorite organic California farm that picks its fruit once every five days to allow for maximum ripeness and can fetch, in select markets, up to $20 per one-pound plastic clamshell. In addition to the drink’s more neutrally flavored elements—avocado, sea moss—it is thoroughly sweetened with banana, dates, maple syrup, and vanilla stevia. (The almond milk and collagen: also vanilla.) I took a few sips and texted my friends: “It’s really sweet.”
Determined to gather more data, I visited another Erewhon location near The Grove a few days later. At the Tonic Bar—which is the area of the store where one can purchase smoothies, coffees, sipping broths, and other potable liquids—I glanced at the receiving counter and saw a long row of pink-and-white-filled cups, arranged in a coquettish row. I watched as a woman in line, with three restless children wrapped around her legs, ordered four Hailey Bieber smoothies. My eyes widened. That’s $80 worth of smoothie right there.
According to Vito Antoci—Erewhon’s executive vice president and brother of its CEO, Tony Antoci—the stores sell a mind-boggling 40,000 Strawberry Skin Glaze smoothies a month. Bieber does not profit directly from sales (though the constant pump of name recognition is priceless), and a portion of the proceeds go to charity. Per Antoci, they’ve nabbed “the demographic of the girls flying from San Francisco to stand in front of Erewhon Beverly Hills with Hailey Bieber smoothies, taking a picture of Erewhon and tagging Hailey. The fan girls really make these drinks viral.”
“What actually happened was that I went into Erewhon just to order a regular smoothie, and then I posted the smoothie on my [Instagram] story,” Hailey Bieber tells me. She’d only shared the breakdown of her usual order—strawberry, banana, peanut butter—but “that week, I went back into Erewhon and they were like, ‘You don’t understand how many people have come in here and ordered the thing that you posted.’” She convinced the Erewhon team that a namesake, Hailey-endorsed drink would be a huge hit.
And while Bieber’s smoothie is the store’s most successful co-branded shake to date, hers wasn’t the first: That distinction belongs to content creator Christina Najaar, who goes by Tinx on TikTok. Erewhon gave Najaar her own off-menu, cacao-flavored shake in early 2021. It wasn’t until 2022’s blue-spirulina-hued “Coconut Cloud” drink (made in collaboration with Marianna Hewitt, a veteran influencer and founder of the skin care brand Summer Fridays), however, that the buzz around Erewhon and its beautiful, expensive smoothies took off online. Hewitt’s $17 Coconut Cloud, dyed two ways with cobalt-blue algae powder and smudged with that same fatty whipped coconut, was a spiritual and aesthetic predecessor to Bieber’s Strawberry Skin Glaze. Like their photogenic namesakes, these smoothies were primed to be posted.
Bieber’s massive platform, plus TikTok’s knack for turning local phenomena into global sensations, propelled Erewhon and its very LA proclivities (selling $26 bottles of “hyper oxygenated water,” for example) into the pop-culture discourse. People flocked to the stores to buy—and post about—the smoothies, emphasizing the market’s clientele (A-list) and prices (exorbitant). When Bieber drove past the Erewhon in Beverly Hills this summer, she says she witnessed hoards of “people walking down the street with the smoothie, holding the smoothie, drinking the smoothie. And I’m like, ‘Damn, that’s so wild.’”
Buoyed by its smoothie phenomenon, the Angeleno grocery chain—whose ten stores all stand in the 40-mile stretch between Calabasas and Pasadena—was written up in Forbes, The New York Times, The Hollywood Reporter, and a New York magazine cover story published last month. Even Vogue’s Emma Specter drank a Strawberry Skin Glaze smoothie every day for a week to test its complexion-boosting properties. Interpersonal gossip has been a boon to sales, too.
“While [Hailey Bieber] was having those issues with Selena [Gomez], it was a little rocky. We had a lot of people supporting one or the other, but we stood with Hailey,” Antoci says, referring to a spate of internet drama last year. “Obviously, if somebody was a criminal or did something criminal, we would obviously pull the smoothie, but we didn't choose to take a side on that, and it worked out best for all of us. We actually sold more Hailey Bieber smoothies that month than any other month during that.”
Per the cultural imagination, Erewhon is a sexier, pricier, and more metaphysical version of Whole Foods, if Whole Foods wasn’t owned by Jeff Bezos and had trendy athleisure merch. The first Erewhon opened in a basement storefront on Boston’s Newbury Street in 1966; its founders, Aveline and Michio Kushi, emigrated to the States from Japan after the war and later got into the food-importing business to suit their macrobiotic lifestyles. Decades after the enterprise moved out west, the Antoci family purchased the then-last-remaining Erewhon on Beverly Boulevard in 2011. At the height of the pandemic, paparazzi photos of celebrities doing their food shopping at Erewhon—which, as a grocery store, remained open as an essential business—felt like a vestige of Hollywood normalcy. (During that same time, a photo of a professional dominatrix walking her submissive on a leash through the Silver Lake Erewhon kindled a round of kink-ethics discourse.)
The store’s name, an anagram of “nowhere,” is taken from Samuel Butler’s 1872 Victorian-satire novel about a society in which machines are banned health and disease is criminalized; Antoci, who describes Butler’s Erewhon as “a story about this utopian world living clean and healthy” and “just a really, really old book,” has an early-edition volume in his office.
This year, in the wake of Strawberry Skin Glaze’s success, Erewhon also partnered with Bella Hadid, whose turmeric-hued beverage contains the model’s line of nootropics-based non-alcoholic spirits, and Emma Chamberlain, on a caffeinated cold-brew shake that blends the influencer’s coffee brand with Biscoff cookies. Antoci has been vocal about the company’s selectivity when it comes to smoothie collaborators—last year, he told Fashionista that Kris Jenner had reached out: “I said to her team, ‘We don’t really see an alignment between Erewhon and Kris—find one of [her] daughters.’” (They ended up working with eldest daughter Kourtney Kardashian Barker, who has her own wellness-coded lifestyle brand, on an inky, health-goth smoothie dyed with activated black charcoal, which is an ancient compound that’s become trendy as a detoxifying agent.)
“There’s been some musical talent that’s come to us, and women, that we just really cannot condone the way they’re leading their life in regards to health,” Antoci tells me. “There’s people that we’ve had to turn down just because they’re just not in line with what our beliefs are in regards to healthy, clean living. I just don’t want somebody who’s not eating this way and believing in this lifestyle to do a smoothie with Erewhon [just] to do a smoothie with Erewhon.”
During my Zoom call with Antoci, I can see that he is sitting at a desk in the Erewhon offices. On the wall behind him are the ingredient placards for some of their most popular collab smoothies including Bieber and Hadid’s, and further in the background is another employee who, at one point during our call, stands to convert their desk to an upright workstation and begins balancing on a sloped board, which can stimulate blood flow. Los Angeles is a mecca for wellness worshippers, where ideal bodies and “lifestyles” are prized and maintained at all sorts of costs. This is a spiritual, financial, and aesthetic pursuit that Erewhon directly caters to. Given actual Daily Mail headlines like “Bella Hadid flashes her taut tummy in a yellow T-shirt as she whips up her $19 Kinsicle smoothie at the upscale Erewhon market” or “Hailey Bieber flashes her toned midriff in a crop top while shopping for organic groceries in LA,” it’s no surprise the company may have a specific image in mind.
Last week, the luxury fashion house Balenciaga staged a runway show in Los Angeles that aimed to satirize and/or emulate this slice of local culture. (Balenciaga designer Demna described people watching at Erewhon like “going to a condensed fashion week.”) Models, clad in sweats and exaggerated Uggs, marched down a palm-tree-lined street carrying trompe l’oeil leather totes made to look like Erewhon paper grocery bags and jet-black bottles of charcoal-apple-lemon-ginger juice. A limited supply of the black Balenciaga juices, priced at $14 each, sold out in Erewhon stores the same week.
Jay Douzi, a creative consultant who has worked with Erewhon on recent drink collaborations, is interested in the lore the Erewhon smoothie has taken on. “It’s interesting on a societal level, I think, how crazy these have gone,” says Douzi, who formerly worked for Kanye West’s projects Yeezy and Donda Sports and is a friend of Tony Antoci’s son Alec. This fall, he linked the grocer with apparel brand Cactus Plant Flea Market to launch a $22 rainbow-tie-dyed smoothie, which arrived with an accompanying merch drop of dual-branded sweatpants and hoodies.
“What is itself a plastic cup with some stuff [inside] that you can make at home, technically, has become literally, like, a symbol of luxury, wealth, status-signaling,” Douzi says. Erewhon is a grocery store, but it is also a museum of consumer packaged goods. While few of us will ever know the feeling that comes with owning a David Hockney (or even a $1,150 co-branded Balenciaga x Erewhon hoodie), we could theoretically get a similar rush from buying a $26 jar of vegan Bolognese sauce or a $17 blended beverage.
But for Los Angeles tourists like me, the Erewhon smoothie tastes most like a when-in-Rome novelty, like trying to get a table at Nobu Malibu or waiting 17 minutes for your Uber to arrive. During my next trip to the city, I returned to the Silver Lake Erewhon to try Hadid’s pleasantly herbaceous “Kinsicle” drink and noticed carloads of young people who, immediately upon exiting their rides, headed straight for the Tonic Bar. In 2023, Erewhon continued to test its smoothie prowess with a number of collaborators, and none have surpassed Hailey Bieber’s in popularity or broad cultural significance.
“I’ve had people hit me [up] that have little kids, babies, that are like, ‘I gave my baby a sip, and they cry when I take it away from them,’” says Bieber. “It’s just so funny.” I had just told her about my own personal Erewhon experience, with the mom and the three kids and the $80 worth of Strawberry Skin Glaze smoothies. The drink, I suggest, has become sort of like an expensive pacifier.
Bieber laughs. “It is an expensive pacifier!”
Eileen Cartter is a GQ staff writer.
