A Documented History of Kava in California — American Kava Association

Overview

Regulators are routinely asked whether kava "has GRAS status." The FDA answered that question in a letter to Congress on 5 July 2024, and the answer was that the question does not apply: traditional kava prepared in the customary manner is a conventional food, and GRAS is an exception to the food-additive rule, not a licence a food needs. California's Department of Public Health now cites that federal letter as the authority for its own written position. This paper assembles the documentary record behind it — customs manifests, a Hawaiian Kingdom licensing statute, the Kingdom consul's own wholesale newspaper advertising, the Sears catalogue, and American press reports of habitual drinking — all of it domestic American commerce, all of it dated decades before the January 1958 cutoff. Every material assertion is footnoted to a primary source, and twenty of those documents are reproduced in the full paper so a reviewer can read them directly.

Abstract

Kava reached California through people before it reached it through trade. Native Hawaiians were counted in the Fort Ross census of 1821, were living at La Playa on San Diego Bay in 1835, were hired by John Sutter in 1839 to build the fort that became Sacramento, and were forty of the 459 recorded residents of San Francisco in June 1847 — roughly one resident in eleven. The commercial corridor those communities worked is the corridor that later carried 'awa into California. By 1865 the Hawaiian Kingdom licensed 'awa sale by statute at $100–$500 a year by district; by 1884 the Kingdom's consul at San Francisco was advertising 6,500 pounds of dried root to druggists and manufacturing chemists; by 1886–88 the Kingdom's customs tables recorded tons of it consigned to United States Pacific ports alongside sugar, rice and coffee; by 1900 Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling it to any household in the country with a postal address. In 1920 a California weekly reported that "many Americans, however, having acquired a liking for it, drink it by the gallon." All of this predates the Food and Drugs Act of 1906, the naming of the FDA in 1930, the 1958 GRAS cutoff and DSHEA's 1994 line. This record does not resolve the toxicological questions the FDA has raised, and it does not claim to. What it establishes is that kava is not a novel ingredient that recently entered the American food supply.

Key Findings

The FDA has already answered the GRAS question — and the answer is that it does not apply. In a letter to Representative Ed Case dated 5 July 2024, the agency wrote that "this traditional use of kava prepared in the customary manner is considered a conventional food, and as such the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) provision of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act does not apply," because "the GRAS provision only concerns certain substances added to food that would otherwise require pre-market approval as a food additive." GRAS is an exception to the additive rule, not a licence a food has to hold.
California cites that federal letter as its own authority. CDPH's standing "Consumer Facts-Kava" page states that kava "would generally not be regulated as a food additive if kava is steeped in only water to brew tea and consumed as a single-ingredient conventional food," and that "there are currently no regulatory limitations regarding the use of kava as a single-ingredient conventional food or dietary supplement." The footnote attached to that sentence is the FDA's 2024 letter to Congress.
Kava was in documented American commerce by the ton, in public, generations before any of the rules existed. A Hawaiian Kingdom licensing statute in 1865; 6,500 lbs advertised wholesale from a San Francisco warehouse by the Kingdom's own consul in 1884; 20,372 lbs of 'awa consigned to U.S. Pacific ports in 1886 alone; 76 sacks landed on one San Francisco wharf on 14 March 1888; an official fluid extract in the National Formulary from 1888; nationwide mail order through Sears by 1900.
Americans, not only Pacific Islanders, were drinking it. The Sausalito News reported on 6 November 1920 that "many Americans, however, having acquired a liking for it, drink it by the gallon," and an Associated Press dispatch of 3 September 1926 described "great quantities" still moving through San Francisco as material used "for beverage purposes."
The pre-1958 record is domestic, which matters legally. 21 C.F.R. § 170.30(c)(2) sets a harder evidentiary bar for use that occurred primarily outside the United States. None of this evidence needs that provision: California has been a state since 1850, and the 1884 advertisement, the 1888 manifest, the 1900 catalogue and the 1920 and 1926 press reports are all American commerce on American soil. Hawai'i's Department of Health reached the same conclusion on the same footing in its January 2024 GRAS determination for 'awa.
The FDA's objection is evidentiary, not categorical — and it has two halves that are usually argued as one. The agency concedes that "the traditional use of kava in beverages extends before 1958." What it says is that it is "not aware of a history prior to 1958 of kava in common use as an ingredient in food that provides sufficient experience … to overcome the documented safety concerns." The documents here address the first half of that sentence. They do not address the second.
This is the category confusion, in one line. The same plant occupies three mutually exclusive regulatory positions — conventional food, food additive, dietary supplement — and which one it occupies is decided by what the seller does with it and how the label reads, not by anything about the root. A single room can cross all three lines in an afternoon.

The question is almost always asked in the wrong form

When a health department asks whether kava "has GRAS status," it has already assumed the conclusion. GRAS is not a licence and not a registry. It is an exception written into the definition of a food additive. If the thing in front of you is a conventional food rather than an additive, the exception is never reached, because the rule it excepts does not apply.

That is not an advocacy position. It is the federal agency's own reading of its own statute, put in writing to a member of Congress, and it is the authority California's health department now cites for its own published guidance.

What the FDA told Congress in 2024

On 5 July 2024 the Food and Drug Administration replied to Representative Ed Case, who had forwarded the agency a memorandum from six named specialists in Pacific agriculture and ethnobotany. The reply runs three pages and is signed by the agency's Acting Associate Commissioner for Legislative Affairs. Its opening paragraph contains the single most consequential sentence in the current American regulatory record on kava.

This traditional use of kava prepared in the customary manner is considered a conventional food, and as such the Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) provision of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act (FD&C Act) does not apply (section 201(s) of the FD&C Act; see also 21 CFR 170.30). The GRAS provision only concerns certain substances added to food that would otherwise require pre-market approval as a food additive.

— FDA to Rep. Ed Case, 5 July 2024

Page one of the FDA's three-page letter to Representative Ed Case dated July 5, 2024, on FDA letterhead. — Page 1 of 3. Reproduced in full — including the agency's statement of its safety concerns — so the operative sentence can be read in its context rather than quoted out of it. Food and Drug Administration, letter to the Honorable Ed Case, U.S. House of Representatives, 5 July 2024.

Read the whole letter, not the headline — The same letter states the agency's continuing safety concerns about kava and hepatotoxicity, and its position that kava added as an ingredient to other foods is an unsafe food additive. Both things are in the document. Quoting either half alone misrepresents it.

What California publishes

CDPH's Food and Drug Branch maintains a standing guidance page, Consumer Facts-Kava, last updated 11 August 2026. Four passages have to be read together, and in practice they rarely are:

"Kava and kava-based preparations may be regulated as food, dietary supplements, or drugs."
"Under federal law, kava as a food additive is not considered generally recognized as safe or GRAS … Kava would generally not be regulated as a food additive if kava is steeped in only water to brew tea and consumed as a single-ingredient conventional food."
"Kava used as a dietary ingredient in a dietary supplement, or kava marketed as a dietary supplement is not currently prohibited in the U.S., as long as all the related federal and state requirements have been met."
"Reports of adverse effects from chronic and heavy consumption … present a public health concern. However, there are currently no regulatory limitations regarding the use of kava as a single-ingredient conventional food or dietary supplement."

The first sentence of the food-additive paragraph is the one that gets quoted. The third sentence of the same paragraph is the one that gets omitted. The department is describing two different legal operations: added to something else, kava is an unapproved additive; steeped in water by itself and served as itself, it is — in the department's own words — "generally not … regulated as a food additive." And the footnote California attaches to that carve-out is not a state document at all. It is the FDA's 2024 letter. California is quoting the federal government back to itself.

Why the date on a customs entry is a legal fact

21 C.F.R. § 170.30(c)(1) provides that general recognition of safety through common use in food prior to 1 January 1958 "may be achieved without the quantity or quality of scientific procedures required for approval of a food additive." The companion definition at § 170.3(f) defines common use in food as "a substantial history of consumption of a substance for food use by a significant number of consumers." That is a documentary standard — which is why manifests, licensing statutes, customs tables and dated advertisements are the right evidence, and why the dates below carry weight rather than colour.

The two chronologies, side by side. The regulatory machinery arrives last.

1812–42 — Regulatory milestone: No California and no United States on this coast. Fort Ross is a Russian-American Company colony. · Kava in the record by that date: Native Hawaiians counted in the Fort Ross census of 1821, alongside Russians, Yakuts, Aleuts, Tlingits, Miwok and Pomo.
1839–50 — Regulatory milestone: Alta California a Mexican territory; no state of California. · Kava in the record by that date: Sutter arrives with Hawaiian workers under three-year contract, 1839. Hawaiians are 40 of 459 recorded San Francisco residents in June 1847.
1865 — Regulatory milestone: No federal food or drug law of any kind. · Kava in the record by that date: Hawaiian Kingdom licenses 'awa sale by statute; fees of $100–$500 per year by district. 'Awa sits in the same administrative bucket as beef.
1870 — Regulatory milestone: California's first public-health body begins operation, 18 March 1870. · Kava in the record by that date: Hawaiian consulate already established at San Francisco (consul appointed 1868).
1884 — Regulatory milestone: No federal food or drug law; no California regulation of botanical goods of any kind. · Kava in the record by that date: The Kingdom's consul at San Francisco advertises 6,500 lbs of choice "Kava Kava" dried root for sale to druggists and manufacturing chemists.
1886–88 — Regulatory milestone: Still no federal food or drug law; no ingredient review of any kind. · Kava in the record by that date: Kingdom customs tables record 20,372 lbs (1886), 9,636 lbs (1887), 9,209 lbs (1888) to U.S. Pacific ports. 76 sacks landed at San Francisco, 14 March 1888.
1888–98 — Regulatory milestone: First National Formulary published 1888. · Kava in the record by that date: Fluid extract of kava official in the National Formulary; full monograph in King's American Dispensatory, 1898, beside coffee, tea, chamomile and ginger.
1900 — Regulatory milestone: No labeling law; no ingredient panel; no age limit anywhere in existence. · Kava in the record by that date: Sears, Roebuck & Co. offers kava nationwide by mail as item No. 6717, "Make Your Own Temperance Wine."
1906 — Regulatory milestone: Food and Drugs Act signed 30 June 1906. · Kava in the record by that date: Eighty-five years of documented Hawaiian presence in California, and twenty-two years of documented wholesale kava dealing in San Francisco, already behind it.
1920–26 — Regulatory milestone: Agency not yet even named "FDA" (renamed 1930); FDCA still twelve years away. · Kava in the record by that date: Sausalito News: "many Americans … drink it by the gallon." AP reports "great quantities" moving through San Francisco "for beverage purposes."
1958 — Regulatory milestone: Food Additives Amendment creates the GRAS exemption; statutory cutoff for common use in food is 1 January 1958. · Kava in the record by that date: Every document above predates the cutoff — the earliest by ninety-three years.
1994 — Regulatory milestone: DSHEA fixes its grandfather date at 15 October 1994. · Kava in the record by that date: Kava was in documented U.S. commerce more than a century before that date.

Sources for each row appear as numbered footnotes in the full paper.

Sears, Roebuck & Co. Catalogue No. 110, fall 1900, showing item No. 6717 Kava Kava — Make Your Own Temperance Wine, a home made temperance drink of the purest ingredients. — Sears, Roebuck & Co., Catalogue No. 110, fall 1900, item No. 6717. One of the largest mail-order houses in America offering kava to any household in the country with a postal address — no prescription, no age limit, no ingredient panel, and no label law anywhere in existence. Sears, Roebuck & Co. Consumers Guide, Catalogue No. 110, fall 1900.

6,500 lbs — Offered wholesale from one San Francisco warehouse, 1884
20,372 lbs — 'Awa consigned to U.S. Pacific ports in 1886 alone
76 sacks — Landed on one San Francisco wharf, 14 March 1888
93 years — Between the earliest document here and the 1958 GRAS cutoff

It was domestic, and that is the harder half of the test — There are two pre-1958 routes, not one. § 170.30(c)(2) covers use that occurred "exclusively or primarily outside of the United States" and demands published documentation corroborated by a second independent source. None of this evidence needs it. California has been a state since 9 September 1850, so the 1884 advertisement, the 1888 manifest, the 1900 catalogue page and the 1920 and 1926 press reports are domestic American commerce inside the window. Hawai'i's Department of Health took the same view in January 2024, holding § 170.30(c)(2) "inapplicable as Hawai'i has been a territory of the United States since 1898."

Not a rare ceremonial botanical

Officials frequently ask whether kava was an everyday article or a restricted ceremonial one. The ethnographic literature is clear that in Hawai'i it was both. Drawing on Mary Kawena Pukui, Handy records that kava was not kapu to the lower classes: "the ali'i drank socially and for pleasure, the kahuna ceremoniously, the working people for relaxation." And: "Kava was not in short supply."

California's record is one of scale and familiarity rather than ritual. Tons through the port. A wholesale offer aimed at druggists. A national catalogue listing. A newspaper reporting habitual American drinking as unremarkable fact. Kava's own serving apparatus — a Samoan 'ava bowl and coconut-shell cup — was photographed before the paying public at the California Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park in 1894.

Where jurisdictions have landed differently

The confusion is real and it is structural. Steeped in water alone and sold as itself, kava is a conventional food under both readings quoted above. Blended into a smoothie it becomes an additive, and on FDA's position an unapproved one. Encapsulated and labelled as a supplement it moves into DSHEA, where it is lawful to sell but unlawful to pour into a beverage. Nothing about the root changes when it crosses those lines.

New York City embargoed kava at two Manhattan cafés and closed them. The Second Circuit affirmed the denial of preliminary relief in December 2024, and in August 2025 the district court held on the merits that the plaintiffs had not proven that kava steeped in water and sold in a New York food-service establishment qualifies as a "food" rather than a "food additive."
Michigan told its local health departments the opposite in January 2023 — that noble kava infused in water "is exempt from the definition of Food Additive … based on its GRAS status." That is the framing FDA called incorrect.
Cocoa, Florida treated the question as land use and set a 500-foot buffer from schools, churches and playgrounds.
Los Angeles County is reported to have updated its notice to retail businesses in February 2026 to permit water-steeped single-ingredient kava, tracking CDPH.
Sacramento, Yolo, Placer and El Dorado — the four counties where this retail category actually grew up — have no published kava-specific guidance, letter or policy that could be located. Inspectors and operators in the region with the longest continuous record of kava retail in the state are working from a state fact sheet and a federal letter to a congressman.

The California trade this record sits underneath

Retail kava service in California is neither new nor marginal, and it began in San Diego: the Kava Lounge on Kettner Boulevard was serving by October 2005, and Mystic Water Kava Bar in North Park — the state's first dedicated kava bar — dates itself to 2010. Root of Happiness opened in Rancho Cordova in 2012; MeloMelo followed in Berkeley in February 2015. Kava root was already being sold by the pound in Fijian and Samoan import groceries in Anaheim, San Jose, Modesto and Oceanside by August 2013, described there as long-established. Kava has been sold at retail somewhere in California without interruption since 2010.

The communities for whom kava is a cultural practice are concentrated here. The 2020 Census counted 68,747 Samoans, 38,170 Fijians and 26,899 Tongans in California; more than seventy percent of everyone in the United States who identifies as Fijian lives in this state, and the largest Fijian population of any county in the country — 11,780 people — is in Sacramento County. In 1980 California counted 2,062 Fijians. The oldest named kalapu in the United States was Californian: Kalapu Tala-Kei-Ola for Tonga of California, incorporated in San Mateo on 2 May 1978.

What this establishes, and what it does not

This record does not establish that every preparation of kava is generally recognized as safe, and it does not attempt to resolve the toxicological concerns the FDA has raised about particular forms, preparations and combinations. Those are scientific questions, and this is a documentary paper.

What it does establish is that kava did not recently arrive in American commerce as a newly discovered dietary ingredient. It was moving through California in commercial quantities by the 1880s, was carried in American pharmaceutical references from the same period, was sold nationally for household preparation by 1900, and was described in the California press as a beverage Americans drank habitually by 1920. Kava came ashore long before the states and agencies that make rules about it existed. Those rules may determine which shelf it belongs on today, depending on how it is packaged and marketed. They cannot erase the record that was written before them.

Conflicts of interest — The author is commercially engaged in the kava trade and is the owner of Root of Happiness, a California kava retailer whose venues appear in the record described above, and a member of the American Kava Association, which publishes this paper. He stands to benefit from a favourable regulatory reading of the history assembled here. The documents themselves are public records, reproduced in the full paper so that any reader can check them against the claims made from them; where a date, address or figure differs between sources, the discrepancy is stated in the text rather than resolved silently.

References

Food and Drug Administration, letter to the Honorable Ed Case, U.S. House of Representatives, July 5, 2024, three pages, signed Erin O'Quinn, Acting Associate Commissioner for Legislative Affairs.
California Department of Public Health, Food and Drug Branch, "Consumer Facts-Kava," page last updated August 11, 2026.
Hawai'i Department of Health, "Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) Determination for 'Awa," January 23, 2024, signed Kenneth S. Fink, MD, Director of Health.
21 C.F.R. § 170.30(c)(1)–(c)(2) and § 170.3(f) (general recognition of safety through experience based on common use in food).
Food Additives Amendment of 1958, Pub. L. 85-929, 72 Stat. 1784; Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, Pub. L. 103-417, sec. 413(c).
"An Act to Amend Chapter 7, Article 2, of the Civil Code, 'On Awa,'" in Laws of His Majesty Kamehameha V., 1864–65 (Honolulu, 1865), p. 3, approved January 10, 1865.
Advertisement of H. W. Severance, Daily Alta California, February–March 1884 ("Six thousand five hundred pounds choice 'Kava Kava,' selected dried root").
"Selections from Custom House Tables, 1888 — Principal Domestic Exports," Hawaiian Annual; "Importations," The San Francisco Examiner, March 14, 1888.
Sears, Roebuck & Co., Consumers Guide, Catalogue No. 110 (fall 1900), item No. 6717, "Make Your Own Temperance Wine."
"Kava in a New Way," Sausalito News (Sausalito, California), November 6, 1920; Associated Press dispatch, September 3, 1926.
King's American Dispensatory (1898); National Formulary (1888), fluid extract of kava.
Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Two Years Before the Mast (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1840), journal entry for May 8, 1835.
Marina Yakovleva, "The Sakha Story of Fort Ross," Fort Ross Conservancy, quoting the Fort Ross census of 1821.
Frank Soulé, John H. Gihon and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (1855), population table for June 1847.
E. S. Craighill Handy and Mary Kawena Pukui, as summarized in Margaret Titcomb, "Kava in Hawaii," Journal of the Polynesian Society 57, no. 2 (June 1948).
Kavasutra 6th Street, Inc. v. Adams, No. 1:23-cv-06359 (S.D.N.Y.); Second Circuit summary order, December 19, 2024; merits ruling, August 2025.
Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, memorandum to all local health departments, "Michigan Retail Food Establishments Selling Kava," January 11, 2023.
Rachna Lal, "US$15 Million Kava Potential Identified," Fiji Sun (Suva), October 2, 2015.
U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census detailed ancestry tabulations for Samoan, Fijian and Tongan populations by state and county.

Cite This

Blythe, T. A Documented History of Kava in California: Migration, Commerce and Regulation, 1815–2026. American Kava Association Technical White Paper No. 14; American Kava Association: Las Vegas, NV, USA, 2026.

Supporting Data and Access

The full paper runs to seventy-five pages and reproduces twenty primary documents as page images, each with a complete footnote giving its archive, publication and URL. Two archives are named in the paper as unread so that a reviewer can extend the record: the Hoover Institution's Hoji Shinbun Digital Collection, and the Hawaiian Kingdom Foreign Office and Executive records for 1842–1900 held by the Hawai'i State Archives, which is the file in which any consular correspondence on 'awa shipments through San Francisco would be found.

The discussion published on this page is complete as an argument. It states the method, the numbers, the limitations and the conflicts of interest, and it is free to read, cite and disagree with. The records underneath it are held for the Association’s members.

Access to those records is open to stakeholders in the American kava growing industry — growers with at least one acre in production and a contract in place for the purchase of licensed planting material.

The reason is simply who this organization is. The American Kava Association is funded by its members and operates for their benefit, and its members are American kava farmers with land, capital and years committed to the crop. This work is self-funded: it was paid for out of working farms, to answer questions those farms were already facing. What the people who paid for it are owed is a working advantage in their own fields. So we publish the findings in full, limitations included, so the work can be judged on its merits — and we keep the underlying files inside the membership that produced them. That is a decision about who we are resourced to serve, not a judgement on anyone who asks.

Researchers and institutions interested in working with this material are welcome to propose a funded collaboration. That is the basis on which the Association can extend it, and we would rather say yes to a properly resourced study than no to a request.

Write to admin@americankavaassociation.org to enquire.

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