“A client can come to me and be like, ‘I need a pallet tomorrow, okay?’ and we can deliver,” Shah said. “We really are looking at this as a boutique kind of niche.”
Shah came up with the idea for Philters in 2019 as the sober-curious movement was picking up steam especially among Gen Z, the generation that came of legal age in the mid-2010s.
Manish Shah, founder of Maya Tea, talks about the future of his company. “We’re just getting started” in the non-alcoholic craft spirits side of the business, “but we’ve got interest around the country, and a lot of cafes and coffee shops and we’ve got a couple of chains starting to use it,” Shah said. “I just feel like I created this at the right place, right time.”
Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star
Some of Maya Tea’s food service clients — restaurants and coffee shops that drive a significant share of the company’s sales — had been asking for a non-caffeinated product to help them create a nighttime business.
“And so we had started noodling about what some tea solutions could be for coffee shops, because that’s our primary market,” Shah recalled. “Fast forward: There’s a pandemic. All hell breaks loose. We have some time, and we start tinkering and we start tinkering, and we make some progress. We get really frustrated. We put it back on the shelf. Make some progress. We get really frustrated. Put it on the shelf, and it was a start to stop, continually.”
When they first conceived the idea, Shah and his team had no idea that the interest in non-alcoholic or zero proof beverages would boom as it has.
Nationwide sales last year surpassed a billion dollars driven largely by NA beers. And while spirits and mocktails made up the smallest percentage of those sales, they represented the fast-growing segment — 70% — from 2024-25, according to the consumer database NielsenIQ (NIQ).
Manish Shah, founder of Maya Tea, shows off a bottle of zero proof Mezkahl that his company has started producing in Tucson under the label Philters.
Mamta Popat, Arizona Daily Star
“It is very interesting to me to see this happening and I’ll be honest, sometimes you find yourself in the right place at the right time,” Shah said. “And I think this is what happened.”
Shah’s initial thought was to create a non-alcoholic spirit that mimicked the flavor of alcohol but wouldn’t require a liquor license to serve.