Think this sounds like a perfectly decent Friday evening with a few spirits? You’d be half right. These are in fact customer reviews for a non-alcoholic botanical spirit range called Sentia Spirits from the UK. 

Now, I'm nothing if not a cynic, and a drink claiming to replicate the feeling of alcohol without the alcohol would normally go straight in the file marked “yeah, right, and pigs fly”. Though to be fair, it was only a matter of time before the non-alcoholic space started to offer the heady benefits of alcohol without the side effects. But what stopped me here wasn't the product or the claim, as much as the company’s name: GABA Labs.

I doubled back and made sure it was what I thought it was. GABA – or gamma-aminobutyric acid – is a neurotransmitter produced in the body and acts as the brain’s main “calming” agent. It helps reduce neuronal excitability, manage anxiety, and promotes relaxation. And it’s an ingredient that’s been used for a long time in Japan and other parts of Asia to help with exactly this. In fact, my first encounter with GABA was over a decade ago when I learned that Japanese brands incorporate GABA into various food and drink products to help students cope with exam stress. This was perfectly acceptable to the food authorities in a country that has pretty high standards for allowing functional claims in F&B. And I’d wondered why we don’t see more of this ingredient elsewhere in the world. 

Time moved on, I forgot, but then the landscape of the world completely changed. Relaxation, mood, and sleep aids (as well as the ingredients that support them) are now major innovation drivers and part of everyday conversations.

What’s fascinating about Sentia is that it doesn’t actually have any GABA in it. It contains a blend of botanicals designed to give you a neuroactive boost by increasing “the effectiveness of the brain’s natural GABA and help absorption of GABA enhancers in the gut.” 

The effect is said to be like what a couple of drinks would have (results are mixed). It allegedly makes you feel more relaxed and more sociable for a bit, with no hangover or too many calories. Peer-reviewed research is limited, though brain scans and EEGs of people drinking Sentia came back consistent with relaxation and sociability, and independent researchers have found enough in the existing GABA evidence base to take the mechanism seriously. 

The company was founded by a neuropsychopharmacologist (mouthful, eh?) who interestingly enough was also the scientist who first proved that alcohol produces its pleasant early effects by stimulating the specific pathway in the brain that involves GABA. 

It’s kind of important to understand the science behind GABA. The ingredient has meaningful clinical evidence across three areas that matter commercially right now. 

The blood-brain barrier question, i.e., whether oral GABA actually reaches the brain directly, remains unresolved, but the gut-brain axis mechanism is gaining credibility. 

To understand why Sentia uses these botanical blends instead of GABA directly is actually no coincidence and it’s worth getting the ingredient’s origin story. GABA has been a fixture of functional food and drink in Japan for a long time. Back in the 1980s, researcher Tojiro Tsushida at Japan's National Research Institute of Tea discovered that placing tea leaves in an oxygen-free environment triggered a natural conversion process that dramatically elevated GABA content. The resulting product was called Gabaron tea and was on pharmacy shelves by the late 1980s. It was the world’s first intentionally GABA-enriched food. It didn’t really work out as consumers thought it tasted too medicinal.

But GABA was never really absent from the diet to begin with. The body produces it naturally, and it is present in a wide range of everyday foods: spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, chestnuts, rice. More significantly, lacto-fermentation produces it as a natural byproduct, which means miso, kimchi, soy sauce, tempeh, aged cheese, and sourdough all contain meaningful amounts. The fermented food traditions that sit at the heart of Japanese, Korean, and broader Asian food culture have been delivering GABA for centuries without anyone calling it functional. 

Following Tsushida's work was a steady, evidence-backed integration into mainstream food culture. Japan's regulatory infrastructure supported this as well. The FOSHU system, launched in 1991, was the world's first government-approved framework for functional food health claims, and GABA's blood pressure evidence earned it formal approval within it. When Japan introduced its Foods with Function Claims (FFC) system in 2015 (which requires manufacturers to submit scientific evidence before making health claims, but without the burden of government pre-approval), GABA became its most used ingredient. And this has been true every single year since. In FY2023, 250 registered FFC products contained GABA, not as supplements, but in food products.

Other foods have also incorporated GABA, including chocolate from Glico and soy sauce from Yamamori.

The rest of Asia was also taking note. Taiwanese tea masters adopted the nitrogen-processing technique from Japan shortly after its late 1980s commercialization. Where Japan struggled to make GABA tea palatable, Taiwan succeeded. By applying the process to oolong, Taiwanese producers created something distinctly smooth and fruity rather than medicinal, and Taiwan is now the main global producer of GABA tea. I even came across a GABA coffee positioned for relaxation last year at THAIFEX-Anuga Asia last year. The Taiwanese company, Foodho International Corporation, even has sugar cubes that are fortified with GABA.

According to the company, they use GABAbiotics, a postbiotic product containing active GABA. It is selected from the lactic acid strain Levilactobacillus brevis (formerly known as Lactobacillus brevis) LBR146 and produced through natural biological fermentation and special heat activation techniques. The LBR146 strain is said to be able to regulate physiological functions, promote relaxation, alleviate stress, and uplift mood.

In 2022, South Korean skincare conglomerate Amorepacific launched its Good Sleep GABA 365 supplement under the Vital Beautie brand. This supplement contains L-glutamic acid fermented GABA powder as its main active ingredient.

China is also showing significant interest in GABA. In 2009, the Ministry of Health of China approved GABA as a new resource food and in 2014, the Chinese government approved and release the first industrial standard of GABA. Over the last few years, GABA enrichment in food has become a major industrial and research focus in the country. 

Across (East) Asia, GABA sits pretty comfortably alongside the functional ingredients currently driving innovation in food and drink globally: ashwagandha from Ayurveda, lion's mane and reishi from Traditional Chinese Medicine, rhodiola from Scandinavian and Eastern European folk medicine, schisandra from Siberia and northern China. GABA also has decades of dominance in the world's most rigorous functional food market behind it.

So the question of why it hasn’t traveled West in any meaningful way was quite interesting for me to explore.

I reached out to two experts from the GourmetPro network. First, Sam Conebar, a regulatory specialist in the UK.

Sam's answer was not at all what I expected. I’d assumed that Western regulators aren't convinced the science is strong enough. Sam’s answer was the opposite. In the UK and EU, GABA is classified as a medicine, because the evidence is strong enough to trigger pharmaceutical classification. In certain EU member states, Finland among them, GABA is classified as a medicinal substance by national health authorities, which restricts its use in food products entirely. 

EFSA rejected health claims for GABA in 2009. The claims covered cognitive function, relaxation, and sleep, and under EU regulations, a rejection of this kind effectively closes the door on all related claims, not just the ones specifically assessed.

There is also a potential novel food requirement: if GABA wasn't consumed in the EU before May 1997, it may require authorization under the Novel Food Regulation before it can be used as a food ingredient at all.

Compare that to ashwagandha. A meta-analysis of 12 randomized controlled trials found that ashwagandha significantly reduced anxiety and stress, but wasn’t ready to confirm clinical efficacy. Lion's mane’s effects are described by its own researchers as a field “within its infancy, with limited placebo-controlled, double-blind studies” to its name. Both are freely available in European health food stores and functional food products. 

All this also explains why Sentia contains no GABA. Since the makers couldn’t add GABA directly to their range, they engineered a botanical blend that activates the same system instead, circumventing the classification problem.

Next, I talked with Laura Allen, one of our US-based experts with expertise in culinary operations and innovation as well as in translating concepts into retail-ready formats. 

In the US, GABA has Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for supplement use and can appear in some functional food products under self-affirmed GRAS, a framework that allows companies to determine an ingredient is safe for food use without FDA pre-approval, as long as they can substantiate that determination. In practice this is a bit of a grey zone: PharmaGABA, a fermentation-derived GABA ingredient produced by Kyoto-based Pharma Foods International, submitted voluntary GRAS notices to the FDA in 2008 and again in 2015, seeking formal clearance for food use. Both times, FDA scientists raised concerns about purity specifications, lack of metabolism data, and blood pressure interaction risk. Both times the company withdrew the application. But I did find a variant from The Functional Chocolate Company that includes PharmaGABA in the ingredients and the ingredient website says it carries the US-FDA’s self-affirmed GRAS approval.

Laura has actually worked on a GABA product first-hand, branded Liquid Calm, a GABA and L-theanine dropper format developed at wellness startup The Well, with a positioning of “calm plus clarity”. But it couldn’t move commercially because, as she puts it, “consumer education was definitely not there yet. For a product that our users found effective, there was also such a huge barrier to entry.”

Part of the problem, she thinks, is format. “People were very used to supplements as pills even though they are not the most activated way to consume GABA.” The dropper, she argued, was actually a better delivery format since it ensured greater bioavailability of the active ingredient and was better suited to be part of a ritual. But American consumers at that point didn’t have the context to understand it that way. Five years on, she sees slow movement: her mother was recommended GABA by a nutritionist for sleep, and even recently noticed it on a standalone merchandiser at Whole Foods. 

On why the evidence base for GABA isn’t deeper, Laura makes a structural point that cuts beyond regulatory friction. GABA is cheap and naturally occurring, and you cannot patent a naturally occurring amino acid. No patent means no pharmaceutical funding pipeline and no large-scale trials. Completely non-scientific reasons to avoid the science for what could support a lot of people’s sleep and stress problems.

As for what's actually moving in the US market right now, Laura sees GABA showing up more as an additive than as a feature “in beverages, drink mixes, and gummies, mostly with a relaxation, calming bet. And I think where those brands have seen growth is in the non-alcoholic alternative space.” 

But the educational gap persists. Laura said that consumers searching for sleep and relaxation solutions are increasingly open to functional ingredients, but most have little understanding of what they're actually taking or how it interacts with other things they’re on. It’s not a conversation that’s made it into mainstream healthcare yet. The intent is there: people want to sleep better, feel calmer, manage stress, but the ingredient knowledge to match that intent largely isn’t.

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