As Auckland’s Four Shells Kava Lounge celebrates its fifth birthday, misconceptions – old and new – persist.
This story was meant to be about a birthday, a couple’s small business connecting Pasifika diaspora to curious New Zealanders and a drink powered by 3,000 years of Pacific culture and cultivation. Instead, shortly before interviewing the owners of Four Shells Kava Lounge, its online store was shut down out of the blue by platform provider Shopify due to the sale of kava products.
When co-owner Todd Henry queried the decision with the company, Shopify responded that it “understood the inconvenience,” but the closure was “not a reflection of the legality of the product but the stance of our banking partners.” Four Shells is not the only kava seller using Shopify to have had their online store removed.
Shopify said it works with these partners, in this case Apple Pay, who did not respond to a request for comment from The Spinoff, to “ensure products meet the Terms of Service for Shopify payments”. In cases like these, Shopify said, the issue is due to restrictions put in place by the partners for product categories supported by Shopify Payment. “Also, the types of businesses listed on the Shopify Payments Terms of Service page are representative but not exhaustive,” the response read.
Four Shells’ online store only makes up a small fraction of the business’ overall revenue, and its brick and mortar in Victoria Park Market is still up and running. E-commerce can be elusive for certain traders (in New Zealand alone, $1.39b was spent on online products in the first quarter of 2024), but it’s not the economic loss that Henry takes issue with: by removing kava products from Shopify’s platforms, he worries misconceptions around the drink will continue to worsen. Four Shells has only been in email correspondence with Shopify and Apple since its online store was removed, with no clear reopening date or plan in sight.
Henry suspects the strongest connection between Shopify’s terms of service and kava is the mention of kratom. In Part B, under “products or services that are otherwise prohibited by law or our financial partners”, the terms of service lists “substances designed to mimic illegal drugs”, specifying kratom.
Kratom is a herbal leaf native to Southeast Asia, which has roots in traditional medicine, but is now more commonly known as a mood enhancer or “gas station heroin”, often mixed into kava cocktails in the US. The US Food and Drug Administration does not regulate kratom as a controlled substance, which contributed to or caused 4,100 deaths across 44 US states between 2020 to 2022. A Tampa Bay Times three-part investigation found that in Florida alone, kratom had contributed to 580 deaths since 2013, and the substance is currently seeing a nationwide crackdown in the US.
Kratom is not legalised in New Zealand, but in the US, the substance is only banned in six states as well as certain towns, while Florida stands as the unofficial kava capital of the US. Last year Bloomberg reported that the number of kava bars in the US had grown from 30 to 400 since 2012, with only a few bars exclusively selling kava. The rest sell kratom alongside kava.
You don’t even need to go to a specialised bar to get a kava-kratom mixed drink in the US: you can find it in cans in supermarkets and gas stations. In 2021, the kava-kratom mixed RTD Feel Free was launched and marketed as a mood-elevating substance, but its use of kratom has since been found to have caused addiction, abuse and dependence in some drinkers. The 2.5k strong community of Reddit’s r/QuittingFeelFree sees daily posts from people documenting their attempts to kick their Feel Free reliance.
There are a number of US variations of kava Henry takes issue with, as kava itself is not consumed for taste, but for the community it carries with it. Henry says he has visited only one kava bar in the US, where the drink was flavoured with mango and pineapple to soften the blow, but he says these attempts at making kava more palatable for the masses (in other words, more of a money maker) take away from the cultural context of the drink. “You can try, but it won’t be authentic, right?”
“My number one gripe with all of this is the association that people have made of kava, with something else. People in the United States always talk about kava and kratom in the same sentence,” Henry says. “Here in the Pacific, kava stands alone: it doesn’t need anything else.”
He notes that the Pacific has very few export offerings, and kava is one of the biggest products in the region. There’s an opportunity here for the Pacific to have its indigenous food and customs on the global stage, but the threat of overseas greed has caused some to call on Pacific leaders to speak up about US exports. Henry hopes kava could still one day be seen as an opportunity for connection, rather than a boogeyman drug.
If you’ve never tried kava before, the immediate thing people will tell you about is the taste. It’s bitterly earthy (like a very strong cup of herbal tea) and having to take it in one gulp, as is custom, comes as a light shock to the system at first. Then there’s the after effects, mythologised by misconception and word-of-mouth as akin to those felt after taking xanax or drinking alcohol. It’s more of a light relaxant, and in the words of Henry, “half food, half community.”
“If we talk about kava as a beverage alone, that’s only half of what kava is,” Henry says, “the other half is the community it facilitates.” Customers frequently tell him they’re just grateful to have somewhere they can find meaningful connection.
It’s a drink that has been enjoyed by the likes of John Campbell and Chlöe Swarbrick, and Four Shells’ clientele ranges from artists to academics, working professionals grabbing a to-go cup on the way home, tourists wanting a taste of polynesian culture and Pasifika diaspora looking for connection. Henry describes their lounge as “pan-Pacific”, representing no one specific Pacific nation as so many have a unique relationship to kava. In Vanuatu, fresh green kava is served, and in Fiji, kava is enjoyed all day, while Tongan custom prefers consumption at nighttime. Research has also shown that Māori may have brought kava with them on arrival in Aotearoa, but as the land’s colder climate didn’t allow for cultivation, kawakawa was used as an alternative.
Henry may not be the man you expect to see behind the Four Shells counter. Bespeckled and palangi, he’s Tongan by marriage – originally from Pennsylvania, he met his wife ‘Anau while working in New Zealand; the two wed in Tonga in 2010 into the family’s long history of kava cultivation. “[‘Anau’s] family was always in the kava business … up in Tonga, they would grow kava and had pounding machines they would fire up early in the morning, and pound kava all day. That was what put food on the table for ‘Anau’s family,” he says.
Kava became an easy entryway into learning more about his new family. “I got into drinking it because I wanted to learn how to speak Tongan and learn about the culture,” Henry says. “I thought, maybe they won’t like this palangi dude being there, but once you feel the effects of kava, nobody’s gonna be mean to you. I found [after] marrying a Tongan, they just treat you like a Tongan.”
Henry often hears that he should have set up shop on Auckland’s risque strip Karangahape Road (a suggestion that makes him laugh, because can you imagine dealing with all those drunks?), but this pocket of Victoria Park was his and ‘Anau’s final bet before giving up on the kava lounge dream. The couple had tried 10 different locations before ending up here, as potential landlords quickly closed their doors after discovering they were planning to set up a kava business.
“The hardest part of setting [Four Shells] all up was finding a landlord that would rent us a space for kava,” Henry says. “The question would come up: ‘what do you want to do here?’ Well, we want to have a kava lounge.” He says he dealt with “patronising” landlords who “would just ghost us, and a couple times people told us it was a ‘dumb idea, it won’t work, we don’t want drunk Samoans coming’ … It’s tied in deeply with racism, people looking at kava like, ‘brown people drink that, we don’t want them around here.’”
The muddied reputation kava is now suffering from its kratom association further fuels this kind of racism, Henry argues. There is no food as misunderstood as kava, and he says Shopify’s decision to remove Four Shell’s store undermines centuries of cultural tradition in favour of misconception. The online store is still closed, and Henry will now apply to use a new payment provider other than Apple Pay to regain access. Letting the issue slide seemed like it would have been more harmful than if they didn’t challenge it, lest they set an example for other kava businesses to be looked over by big corporations, he says. “It feels like it could be the tip of the iceberg for kava.”