If you’ve picked up a can from the new wave of alcohol alternatives, there’s a decent chance kanna is on the ingredient list. It’s not a made-up wellness buzzword — kanna (Sceletium tortuosum) is a succulent plant with a long history in South Africa, where it’s been chewed, smoked, and brewed for centuries. Now it’s showing up in modern cans instead of clay pots, and it’s quickly become the ingredient people ask about by name. Here’s what kanna actually is, and why it’s earned a permanent spot in this new category of drinks.
From Traditional Plant to Modern Can
Kanna grows in the arid regions of South Africa, where indigenous Khoikhoi and San communities have used it for generations to ease tension, lift mood, and bring people together socially — not unlike the role alcohol plays in many other cultures, but without the sedation or the hangover. Traditionally, the plant was fermented, dried, and chewed, or ground into snuff. That long track record of use is part of why kanna has translated so easily into a modern beverage format: it wasn’t invented for this purpose, it was simply reformulated for it.
Kanna has become central enough to the category that some brands now market a kanna functional drink as its own distinct style, separate from other botanical blends.
What makes kanna interesting from a functional standpoint is how it appears to work. Early research points to kanna’s alkaloids interacting with serotonin pathways in the brain, which lines up with the calm, sociable, slightly uplifted feeling many people report after trying it. That’s a meaningfully different mechanism than alcohol’s effect on the central nervous system, and it’s a big part of why kanna-based drinks don’t come with the same next-day cost. It also explains why kanna, rather than some newly synthesized compound, became the anchor ingredient for an entire category of drinks built around feeling good without ethanol.
Kanna isn’t a marketing gimmick dressed up in botanical language — it’s a plant with centuries of documented use that happens to fit perfectly into what modern drinkers are looking for: a real effect, without alcohol’s downsides. As more people start reading ingredient labels instead of just calorie counts, expect kanna to keep showing up as the name behind the feeling. If you’re curious what that actually tastes and feels like, trying a can yourself is the fastest way to find out.
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