Category: Analysis

In space, no one can hear you scream

April 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I was reading a sci-fi book (not linked to the title of this post as it would be too obvious and by know I think you know me) set in a very far-away future where mankind is no more and what remains are a full nation of huge spaceships that have to deal with an extraterrestrial threat. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you with a summary of the two books and their more than 1,000 pages but get straight to the point (without teasing just in case) and to the tea.

At the end of it, two of the main protagonists are watching something happening above them and trying to figure out what to do and one of them drinks a liquid just before this small dialogue takes place (the translation being mine and only mine, all mistakes are also mine):

  • This infusion has a strange taste to it.

  • This is no “infusion”, it is tea. The drink of a civilisation that no longer is.

And then they keep on looking at the skies where a space battle is taking place and talking about what to do and what not to do.

Apart that I was delighted to see in a book I was reading someone thinking that tea would still be around in the future, which means that I am not the only one thinking about tea in the future (apart from a bunch of Stormtroopers), it made me think about a couple of things.

Even if there is no human around and probably because the protagonists were in a way created by human beings, they value the products of the different civilisations originating from Earth (or at least one of them and no it has nothing to do with the British Empire). This means that by saying “the drink of a civilisation that no longer is”, it puts tea above every other drink, giving it a quasi mythological status and enabling the two characters drinking it to access to a quasi “human being” status because they act like ones even though the last human disappeared a long time ago.

What I find even more interesting is that for the writer in the future (and we speak of thousands of years) and in spite of the fading memories of everything linked to human cultures, drinking tea is still linked to moments of calm, meditation… I know this is a personal view but it reminded me of the legends of Shennong or Bodhidharma discovering tea while or after meditating. Perhaps the author knew about this because one of his two protagonists, the older one, the one that knows abou tea was at some point in its history the gardener of a stone garden, a bit like the zen gardens, the ones that are designed to imitate the essence of nature and not nature itself in order to help the gardeners to meditate on life.

And the last interesting thought I had is that tea is indeed a civilized drink as it is used to foster conversation and to do it in a civilized way while contemplating a space battle with thousand of deaths. Does it give the people drinking it the capacity to absorb themselves into something else or does it have something to do with being drunk slowly over and over, which makes people more likely to try to do something like small talk while waiting for the next gulp? Does it bring people to another plan of existence that makes them more gentle and likely to talk?

Because of what I wrote before and the thoughts these few lines brought to my mind, I couldn’t picture any other drink that could do the trick but perhaps I am biased. So tell me if you share this analysis or if I am completely wrong.

But beware of who or what might be roaming in space and in the far away future as “in space, no one can hear you scream” and I highly doubt tea will be able to save you.

I want it all

March 21, 2018 / / 2 Comments

After a small hiatus, I am back and I must confess something: I am a consumer and a modern one, which means I want everything, that I want it all and I want it now.

No don’t bother to send me over to any video website with “I want it all” from Queen, this is not what I want right now. Mostly because I prefer the album Queen II with the story you can imagine in it or some specific songs… but enough of digressing and back on topic.

As I said, I want it all and I want it now. I have been well educated by all these companies selling products on the Internet, you know the ones with all the products you ever wanted, including this old book/CD… that you wanted and that were published in 1985 or something like that. Of course, they have everything because their strategy is focusing on selling a small number of every product instead of a “huge” number of best-sellers; they make more money by doing the first than the second and this for several reasons, among them their capacity to optimise infrastructure both physical and virtual. This strategy is called the long-tail.

As is perhaps obvious from my blog, I am a tea consumer and as most of you (or so I guess), I have my preferred teas, those that I am always eager to have or to drink (which doesn’t mean that I don’t experiment with new ones from other companies or sources) and they can be nature or aromatic. My main problem is that over the years, I have developed a selection of teas that I like that are from different companies and in spite of most of them copying one another, there are still some unique blends or gardens that can only be found by one company.

This is where problems might begin as there are two options: first, the targeted teas are only available at a physical shop, which might be in the neighbourhood or not ; the second option is that they are also available on the Internet on the website of a company selling them. However (and I understand why), the shipping costs to the customer are high, even more when buying only one tea. As I said, I understand why there are high because most companies are trying to protect the products they are selling from harm, they are also using nice ta boxes (which are heavier) or offering you the possibility to follow your shipment… but understanding why doesn’t mean approving.

In an ideal world, these companies (both small or big) could work together through a website focusing on the long-tail approach, with a lot of different teas from different companies, enabling both a big choice and controlled shipping costs thanks to their expertise in logistics and their size, which would allow them to negotiate in better terms with delivery companies.

However, even if it might seem a good idea on paper, it is probably a bad one in real life for at least 3 different reasons.

First of all, as I said earlier in this post, companies are quickly copying one another and bringing them all together on one distribution platform would mean increasing this as companies would be able to see what sells best and try to bring it into their portfolio. This would lead to less innovation and more conservatism for most companies.

Second, tea is a fresh product, one with a date of consumption (even if it varies depending on the tea and the way it is stored), which means you can’t store it forever and expect to sell it in a drinkable way, unlike a book or a CD or most products.

Third but not least, there is the problem of the bargaining power between the platform and the tea companies. Most tea companies are small or let’s say smaller than the distribution platform would be. Why does it matter? Because when you are small and are facing a giant, you don’t have much bargaining power and thus in the negotiations for the split of the benefits, you have less weight and are more likely to lose it, making your company lose money or earn less.

This is why although I, as a consumer, would probably want it and like it, I can’t recommend on the long run the creation of a big centralised webstore with every or most teas as it would do more harm than good.

I feel compelled to end this post by a disclosure note. Don’t worry, I am not the customer that I depicted; after all I drink tea and I keep calm. Although sometimes…

Every luxury must be paid for

January 24, 2018 / / 2 Comments

I have what I would call a professional bias: when I read about prices from old times, I think about how much it would be today. You might not know it but for different reasons, prices are changing over time meaning that you can buy more or less goods for the same amount of money. This is what is called inflation.
This has been going on since the human kind invented money (don’t worry, I won’t bother you much longer with details) and it explains why the real value (real in economics) is different than the nominal one (again in economics).

When I read thanks to Twitter that the oldest reference to tea in Britain had been found in a document from 1644 I was really curious but when I read that there was a price for a cup of green tea from China, I was even more.
4 shillings for a cup… How much would this amount of money be worth now? And how would it compare to our standards?

As I explained earlier, to know that, you just need to find either a table with all the figures of the yearly inflation from 1644 to nowadays or one showing the real value of the money between those two time periods.
The problem being that statistical institutes weren’t around so early and the goods making the price basket weren’t the same now and them. Both things making it quite complex to make extrapolations.
Luckily, I found two papers dealing with this topic in Great Britain. The first is Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage Rate by E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins in Economica, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 92 (Nov. 1956) and the second is Inflation: the value of the pound 1750-2011, Research paper 12/31 from the House of Commons Library (29 May 2012).
With these two papers combined, it should be possible to go as far as 1244 and back to 2011. I said “should” because the method used in both papers is not really the same and the second one uses also several methods to give the members of the House of Commons an approach and a range for the oldest inflation rates.

So by mere calculation (those that followed until now will tell me that there is a gap in my years but converting pounds from 2011 to 2017 is easily done thanks to some tools found on the Internet), the 4 shillings of 1644 become between 37.22 and 46.50 pounds of today or between 42.20 and 52.72 euros.

To give you (and me) an idea, I looked at prices for 100 grams of green tea of China and I found a price between 5 and 68 euros depending on different things, which for a cup of tea with let’s say 3 grams of tea in it would make a price between 0.15 and 2.04 euros.
Even if the price would probably be a little higher (people have to make a living out of it) and if there might be a few mistakes in the conversion to real value (something quite understandable due to lapse of time under consideration), the difference shows us that in 1644, tea was really a luxurious product and that drinking a cup of tea was the sign of belonging to the upper class.

I am glad I don’t live back in these times as I wouldn’t be able to indulge in tea drinking and that would be really sad.

(Go West) We will do just fine

December 23, 2017 / / 10 Comments

I don’t know if you see a pattern between the title of this post quoting the Pet Shop Boys, my previous post where I did a little (and probably not that good) Haiku with a reference to map and tea and what you will find in this post but I hope that by the end of your reading you will.

As the idiom goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is what had bothered me when I looked at the FAO data, splitting the world of tea into two categories: the Old World and the New one. If you don’t remember this post, its conclusions were that unlike in the wine industry, there was not a big reversal of production in the tea producing countries (but perhaps interesting developments going on in terms of diversity of producers).

But let’s get back to a picture is worth a thousand words. I am lucky to have at work two people working on our Geographical Information System, which for those who don’t know about it is according to Wikipedia “any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations.”

Those two people were friendly enough to help me to refine my needs and helped me find a way to present to you a visual representation of these data.

So you will find below a representation by decade from the 1960s to the 2010s (with the data ending in the year 2014) of the tea producing countries in the world and for each an average of the yearly production of each country during these 10 years. Even if it doesn’t always mean much, I thought it was as good as anything else to represent how much each country weights in the tea world. For more details, just click on the link below each map.

Tea producing countries from 1961 to 1969

Tea producing countries in the 1970s

Tea producing countries in the 1980s

Tea producing countries in the 1990s

Tea producing countries in the 2000s

Tea producing countries between 2010 and 2014

 

What can we learn?

First, that there are over these 50 years only a few new producing countries. I am still undecided whether or not this is true or linked to a problem in the way the FAO collects its data. If you see any country missing on the maps, do tell me and I will look further on.

Second, we can now visually see the rise and decline of some countries in terms of their yearly average production through each decade, something which might be of interest for later investigations.

Third and most important for me, we can now see the 3 main producing blocks in terms of number of countries located on three different continents (the South of Asia, the centre of Africa and South America from North to South) with some more exotic spots around them. It might be obvious to some of you but although I had all the data available, I had no idea that so many countries produced tea until I saw it

And what are your thoughts on these maps? Did they bring anything to you?

Were you born on the sun?

October 28, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I could have gone with The Times They Are a-Changin’ from Bob Dylan but quoting a Nobel Prize is a bit too much out of my league, so I had to get back to a good old classic, Good Morning Vietnam.

I read just a few days ago in The Washington Post (no I don’t read this journal, I just happened to find out about it thanks to the powerful tool that is a collection of blogs on various topics) that scientists were working to adapt coffee plants for climate changes and other woes. Their efforts go mainly towards the creation of new “species” (something that has been done for centuries) to make up for the limited gene pool as only two species of coffee have been used for human consumption. However, some people say that it might be too late for all the places where coffee is being produced.

This article made me think a little about our (I guess so if you are reading my blog or at least my) favourite drink and what might happen with it. I remembered having found some research reports on some really specific or country related problems, like the future for the Kenyan tea industry.

The most obvious effects of climate change are changes in temperatures, changes in rainfall and a certain unpredictability of the weather (with the famous “there are no seasons anymore”).

For now, perhaps because of the high differences between the different producing countries, I couldn’t find any consensus on the main consequences with things ranging from “we will manage to get through it without any problems” (which seems a bit unbelievable) to “it could be a complete disaster and force us to stop or to reallocate the production of tea in other areas or in other countries.”

The main reason behind these differences is that the producing countries are located in a rather wide set of conditions and on different continents, with each one facing different potential weather problems. Just to illustrate, let me remind you that tea grows mainly in tropical and subtropical climates but some varieties tolerate marine climates. The tea plants require at least 127 cm of rainfall a year and prefer acidic soils but this is not absolutely vital. You can find them in elevations up to 1.500 meters above sea level but also on much lower grounds.

There are however some things that are agreed by most.

First, the climate change is likely to be changing the taste of tea because warmer seasons and less water are interacting with the chemical components of the tea leaves, making them react in other ways as they would “normally” do. This has already been documented in China (in the province of Yunnan) and in Japan.

A second impact that makes consensus is that changing weather hurts the production but in the future who knows what might come up and who knows how fast the changes will go on.

On a positive sidenote, tea bushes requires less water than coffee plants (I read from 1 to 10), which might be of some help.

There are other indications that perhaps the geographical locations of some tea gardens are isolating them creating a micro-climate that could mitigate the effects of the climate change, because of the mountain slopes, the winds and the mist are giving on a daily basis water to the bushes and could make it up for the less frequent and abundant rain.

Mist at a tea garden at Darjeeling by Joydeep

Other solutions advocated are to go for organic approaches with natural techniques to mitigate the impacts, things like having the ground covered by natural nutriments…

For me, at this moment in time and with no certitude regarding any potential long impact, there are three ways :

– trying to improve the plants through research,

– trying to mitigate the effects either through specific methods (better irrigation systems when possible) or through more general ones (like covering the ground),

– migrating the production.

The most likely road is a mix of the three depending on the interest of all the people involved in the tea industry, of the readiness of the consumer to pay more and on the progress of these climate changes.

This means that we (tea drinkers) like a lot of people are likely to see a radical change in the way we have to deal with our favourite drink.

We need to know that and be ready to face changes in the tea industry and support them or try to find better ways for The Times They Are a-Changin’.

And it will be true

August 28, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Bronze plate for printing an advertisement for the Liu family needle shop at Jinan. Song Dynasty (960-1279). Picture taken by BabelStone

What would we be without good old advertising? Advertising, ie a form of paid message that intents to promote or sell something (an idea, a service, a product) to someone, is nearly as old as society. I learned while looking around in order to write this post that the Egyptians did it and perhaps even before that (think of it as sponsored cave art saying who the best hunter is or at least that is what I thought when I read about it).

But enough with old times and let’s get back to the modern commercials and ads we all know and dislike (let’s be honest about it even the good ones are too much in the modern days).

There are different theories relating to what people are waiting for before purchasing anything and how to “influence” them. I said “influence” because it is not like we (yes all of us) are being brainwashed or anything like that. We are just exposed to different vectors of information that try to promote and sell us some things.

And as you might guess there is no single theory regarding how we are affected and how we respond (if there was one 100% accurate, there would be no need for the others). So let’s assume that our purchase action is a rather linear process (and by doing it I follow one model but I am oversimplifying the whole process) : we get from awareness (knowing that a brand/company/product exist) to interest (“wouldn’t it be great to have that as it would suit my lifestyle) to desire (“I want it” or “I don’t want it”) to action (I plan on buying it or I buy it).

Overflow of phases in the customer journey with media by Nick Nijhuis (https://nicklink.nl/)

The message and media are adapted for each part and for each target that a company want to reach. This means that they are most of the time prisoner of their/our own stereotypes and can only play in this field as it is quite complex to change completely the image of a product/brand. For example, in English (like in French), an Ersatz good is a replacement product for something but one of inferior quality, a connotation that this word doesn’t have in German. Now imagine how hard it would be for such a product to change this connotation only through advertising (and even with some help from others). History is full of companies trying to launch new products that don’t fit with their perceived sphere of influence and that fail.

So let’s get a look at tea: what do most people expect when they think of it? Old and exotic (since it was first produced in China) but classy (the English 5 o’clock tea) and thanks to the wonder of modern marketing good and the natural positioning that most of us have in mind good for health/diet/…

And guess what? Those are exactly the words used in the different advertising campaigns. The different companies use different positioning as they know that one product or one brand can’t do it all but they go there on this safe territory where we expect their teas to be.

“Drink Coca-Cola 5¢”, an 1890s advertising poster

No one will venture out on the unknown because we (not the we the ones that know a thing or two about tea but the other we, the one that is for everyone) would be lost and if we are lost, these companies would have to rebuild everything from scratch, something that can’t be afforded for a product that was around for so long.

To change the advertising we see, we need to have new expectations and to do that, people must be better tea litterated (this works for other products too). This is the only way to have companies changing the way they act.

After all, as said in Mad Men, “I’m not saying a new name is easy to find. And we will give you a lot of options. But it’s a label on a can. And it will be true because it will promise the quality of the product that’s inside.»

And the old one an achievement?

July 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

New World… these words reminds me of the Age of Discovery, to sails moving into the wind, to the smell of the sea or if you are more a Sci-Fi person to the travels of the spaceship Enterprise that goes where no man has gone before.

But not today. Today, I will not speak about old times or future times or about games but only about drinks and I will invoke another drink to allow you to better understand what I mean : wine. New World wines are wines that are produced outside of the traditional (ie historical) wine-growing areas of Europe and the Middle-East. The questions are “is there a New World tea question?” and if yes, are there any ideas to take from the wine industry?

As he already did several times without knowing it, a fellow blogger inspired me to move this topic on top of my to-do list with his tasting sessions from teas coming from strange places and done in “strange” ways. So thank you Lazylitteratus.

A preliminary remark is that Old World and New World mean different things depending on whether we are in the wine or the tea industry.

Regarding the definition of what an Old World tea is, I just looked at all the producing countries according to the Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and classified them.

Here is a list of what I took into account in the Old World category (obviously, this is when you are more than welcome to shoot at myself and tell me that I am wrong):

Bangladesh

China, Mainland

China, Taiwan

India

Indonesia

Japan

Kenya

Malawi

Mozambique

Portugal

Republic of Korea

Sri Lanka

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

Zimbabwe

The Old World in 1961

My criteria were twofold: first, there had to be before the beginning of the 20th Century some documented growing of tea going on in this country and when I had some doubts, I looked at their production in 1961 (first year reported in the FAO database) and if the production was non-existent or really low, I dropped them off the list.

Obviously since the world has a little changed between 1961 and 2014 (last year available for the FAO statistics), I had to make some change following the fall of the former USSR.

Bangladesh

China, Mainland

China, Taiwan

Georgia

India

Indonesia

Japan

Kenya

Malawi

Mozambique

Portugal

Republic of Korea

Russian Federation

Sri Lanka

Zimbabwe

The Old World in 2014

Now that I have this list, what is the value of these two productions? In other words, is there anything to talk about?

Tea production in tonnes (source FAO)

I decided not to display every year but every 10 years apart from the last years which are much more interesting to see what happened in the last years.

And as you can see, there is something interesting going as over the last 14 years, the New World production has doubled to reach around 1,000,000 tons pro year, which is something that begins to count but is still far from the Old World production that over the same time period also increased by some 2,000,000 tons.

It is not that big yet but there is something going on and as some of you might have already tasted, there is something interesting going on in the tea world.

The situation is not really the same in the wine industry as illustrated in the graphic below.

Wine production in tonnes (source FAO)

I know that looking at wine production in tonnes can seem strange but this is the only unit they have. Perhaps it is easier to calculate?

But let’s go back to our topic. As seen, both the production and the weight of the New World vs the one of the Old one are on a total different level as in the tea industry. Probably because the history of this “fight” goes back way before that or because growing grapes and making wine is easier as making tea (I am just kidding)?

However, if we look back at the overall picture of the wine industry and how the New World wines managed to find a place under the sun when they were first considered as inferior wines, there are some things that could path the way for more developments in the tea industry.

This will be what I will do in my next article.

Is the gap narrowing?

June 29, 2017 / / 0 Comments

According to a radio emission I heard a couple of weeks ago, coffee is the second most valuable item sold in the world behind oil. When I heard that, I had to check if it is was true and compare it to similar data for tea.

But first, I have to tell you a little story. I was asked why I wanted to compare everything to tea or rather does tea people have an inferiority complex regarding to coffee? The truth is much more simple. I do drink tea and speak about it on my blog. When I heard that radio emission on coffee, I had to check it and compare it to my favourite beverage, which is something that it could be compared to. I have no inferiority complex but a deep sense of curiosity trying to determine what is the truth in what I read and I must confess that I tend here to bring everything to the main topic of the blog: tea.

After this small deviation from my point today, let’s first thank the Food and Agriculture Organisation and their databases, which allowed me to collect data from 1961 and to check it, cross it and so on.

Total export value in 1,000 $

First, it is true that coffee has a higher sales value than tea. I couldn’t find a year when this wasn’t the case.

Then I thought that perhaps tea had a higher value per ton than coffee. I did the maths to find the average price in a year and over the 52 years of my sample (1961-2013), tea had the highest sale value pro ton 27 years and coffee 25 years. Surprising? Not really because it is an average and it takes everything into account from the production for the multinationals to the more artisan crafted products. However, as you can see below, the export value of coffee is far more erratic as the one of tea, which might be linked to several things, either variation in quantity (which is not really what happened as we will see) or in the quality of the production or in the way the prices are made (there are several ways of doing that with a possibility for the price to become completely disconnected from the real life conditions).

Export value per ton in $

I then thought that perhaps not everything was accounted for as a lot of tea is not sold on the international market (between 35 and 47% of the tea production was exported in the last 10 years and between 76 and 91% of the coffee production) so I decided to check if by adding the locally consumed goods, the overall picture became different…

Total production value in the world in $

…and the answer is no.

Why? The only explanation lies in the higher production of coffee in the world. Even if the difference is decreasing, it is still a huge one. In 2013, 1.58 more tons of coffee were produced in the world as tea (8,8 millions tons against 5,56) but the gap is narrowing as it comes from an impressive ratio of 4.64 in 1962 (4,53 millions against less than a million).

Total production in the world in tons

The only question I can see from this latest chart is to know if this trend will hold on the long run and will tea production narrow the gap with the coffee one.

Rather than be a theoretical question or an ego one from a tea drinker, it is more a way of knowing the maturity of the production of each commodity, its attractiveness to newcomers, the progresses it can make in productivity (I partly answered this question in another of my blog posts).

And those are interesting questions or so do I think.

Where is Mike?

March 30, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This post has nothing to do with the famous game “where is Charlie?” where you had to find someone called Charlie in a crowd who sometimes were wearing the same clothes as him. And no, it has nothing to do with Mike + the Mechanics, apart from the last part of the name of this famous band from before (before being different for the different people but I must get back on tracks), so let’s begin with my topic of the day: mechanisation.

Mechanisation is switching from a work done by hand or animals to one done by machines. This is a process that began a long time ago, when a man or a woman decided to use hand tools to perform certain tasks.

The idea was probably first to do a better job, to ease things, to be more productive. One of the first examples of a “modern” tool like this one was the mechanical reaper invented by the Celts (and then forgotten before being reinvented in the 19th century) and that might originate in a shortage of labour.

This was the main reason behind the increase in the use of mechanical devices in Western Europe since with first, the industrial revolution that led to less people being available in the fields and then the First World War, a big shortage of labourers appeared at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In the USA, the situation was different because of the sheer size of the country and its “low” density when compared to Western Europe.

What are the main advantages in using mechanical devices to harvest, pluck… different products?

First, in most sectors, machines have become cheaper than man (if you include all the costs). Second, the raw productivity difference/the efficiency (how much hectares can be harvested by each of them in one hour) is clearly an advantage for the machines.

What are the disadvantages? For most fragile crops or for those with specific plucking needs, the problem is that mechanical plucking is destructive since hand work can be more specific and cautious. This is or this is not a problem depending on how the tea is later treated (CTC or whole leaf teas with the tip and two leaves or going into teabags for one of the big companies out there).

Since the main advantage of mechanisation is to replace man, it is no wonder that machines are more used in countries with either a less numerous work force (because fewer people are available for this kind of job or because the population numbers are low), a costly one… A few names? Japan, the United States, some places in India…

Just look at the videos below.

Is this something new? Not really.

“The method was to turn the tea plantations into outdoor factories, to « industrialise » every stage of the process as far as possible and by this method to reduce costs. […] What made tea plantations special was that they took the process from start to finish; from the clearing of the land, through planting and picking”

“The normal solution in such a situation would be to mechanise”

Green Gold by Alan MacFarlane and Iris MacFarlane, Ebury Press 2003

These two quotes describe the situation in Assam in the 1860s when people invested a lot after the boom in the tea industry and faced some problems like the not optimised nature of their estates, the high mortality rate on the plantations, the need to “import” people to work there (with really harsh conditions during the travels).

As I said, mechanisation began a long time ago and will not stop anywhere soon. The only question we need to answer is can engineers design machines that will be able to pluck every kind of tea without breaking it?

This remains to be seen.

How big is big?

March 1, 2017 / / 1 Comment

Where does tea come from? I don’t mean where exactly but who controls it? Who produces the more?

Believe it or not the answer is not easy to find. Thanks to Internet and the Economic Times, I found out that in 2014, the world’s largest bulk tea company was McLeod Russel India Ltd (a company I had never heard of) and that it was aiming at diversifying its plantation business to mitigate risks and grow in the coming years. I then found out that the second largest company was Tata Beverages Limited.

I began looking all over to see if I could find more info about production, number of estates, locations… and I couldn’t find much. I was able to find some information for McLeod Russel India Ltd but not always consistent with other sources found on the website. One reason could be that merger and acquisitions make things complicated to follow but as you can see below this is probably not the main reason.

Area under production (ha) Production (tons)
2010-2011 34,091.40 74,871.72
2011-2012 34,575.13 79,308.11
2012-2013 34,310.26 78,213.26
2013-2014 34,100.37 87,110.72
2014-2015 33,947.35 80,056.98
2015-2016 33,899.07 85,675.36

Tea estates of McLeod Russel India Ltd (source McLeod Russel Groupe website)

With merger and acquisitions, the area under production would change and increase and except for the last year, for which I found evidence in another place that new estates were added, this is was here obviously not what happened as the areas and even the estates stayed the same over the 6 years period (yes you can find their names if you look for it).

This peculiar company focus has always been in Assam and Dooars, probably for historical reasons. However recently, they acquired estates in other countries (Rwanda, Uganda and Vietnam), bringing their number of estates to 63.

How do this new estates compare to the others? I collected some data, that are not 100% consistent with the ones found earlier but that should be able to give us some insights on this peculiar question.

Assam – North Bank Assam – South Bank Dooars Vietnam Uganda Rwanda Total
Number of estates 23 25 5 7 5 2 67
% of total 34.33% 37.31% 7.46% 10.45% 7.46% 2.99%
Area under production (ha) 16,253 14,587 3,257 1,662 2,973 1,239 39,971
% of total 40.66% 36.49% 8.15% 4.16% 7.44% 3.10%
Average area per estate (ha) 706.65 583.48 651.40 237.43 594.60 619.50 596.58
Production (tons) 38,937 40,436 6,375 8,500 17,365 4,870 116,483
% of total 33.43% 34.71% 5.47% 7.30% 14.91% 4.18%
Average production per estate (tons) 1,692.91 1,617.44 1,275.00 1,214.29 3,473.00 2,435.00 1,738.55
Productivity (tons/ha) 2.40 2.77 1.96 5.11 5.84 3.93 2.91

Tea estates from the McLeod Russel Group (source McLeod Russel Group website)

What can we learn from this table?

That the main activity from the McLeod Russel Group is still made in India, where they have most of their teas estates, the bigger ones and those with the highest production level. However the new “countries” have estates that on average are as big as those from the “old” ones (apart for Vietnam, where they are slightly smaller) and are fare more productive (between 2 and 3 times more). This could be explained by the younger age of the plants, the geographical organisation of each estate and perhaps by more intensive production techniques.

Now that we know a little more about the largest bulk tea company in the world, how does it fare when compared to both the production and the size of the area under production? I will not look at productivity as the list of tea producing countries is so big with countries in different parts of the world that it would be like comparing peaches and apples, they are both fruits but not at all comparable.

Here the obvious source of information is the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), an UN agency that has a database with a lot of data on nearly everything produced. However as always, this kind of data is long to collect, which means that if I can go back to 1961, I can only come back to 2014. But one has to do what he can with what he has.

Regarding this timeframe, I will also have to make one last assumption as McLeod Russel Group publishes data for periods overlapping 2 years (for example 2010-2011) where as the FAO is on a yearly set of data. I will therefore compare 2010-2011 to 2010 and so on.

Area under production in the world (ha) Area under production by McLeod Russel India (ha) Weight of McLeod Russel India Production worldwide (tons) Production by McLeod Russel India (tons) Weight of McLeod Russel India
2010-2011 3,145,177 34,091.40 1.08% 4,603,516 74,871.72 1.63%
2011-2012 3,400,106 34,575.13 1.02% 4,773,895 79,308.11 1.66%
2012-2013 3,504,971 34,310.26 0.98% 5,034,639 78,213.26 1.55%
2013-2014 3,616,415 34,100.37 0.94% 5,349,088 87,110.72 1.63%
2014-2015 3,799,832 33,947.35 0.89% 5,561,339 80,056.98 1.44%

Worldwide weight of McLeod Russel India (source McLeod Russel Group website and FAO database)

The biggest bulk tea company is worth 1% of the total tea production areas in the world and around 1.5% of the tea produced in the world in any said year.

This brings two comments: the first one is that the productivity of each tea hectare owned by McLeod Russel India must be higher than the average productivity in the world (otherwise both weights calculated above would be the same), which says something about this last one as we saw earlier that the productivity on McLeod Russel India was overshadowed by the one from its newest estates. However as we all know it, productivity in tea isn’t the Alpha and the Omega of everything.

The second comment is that in the tea world, a giant producer is still a small player. Why do I say that? In most industries, the top 20% manage to produce or to sell 80% of the total production (this is a rule of thumb based on the Pareto distribution) while here because of the dispersion of production, it seems rather unlikely that such a level of control can be reached from the production side. The only reason that could lead to a high concentration level would be if the market on the “customer” side was dominated by a few big names that could buy most of the production and be in a situation of monopoly. But this would be another thing to study.