Category: Industry

Where Eagles Dare

July 30, 2020 / / 2 Comments

After learning that Japanese beef was graded with a two dimensional system (A, B, C and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5), I had thought I could work on the reason behind the different grades in tea (the most known being in the former English colonies and only for black teas).

To do so I began looking in my books on tea for evidences on why this system was in use and how it the other tea producing countries that did not follow it dealt with this topic. Let us just say for now that the other system combines geographical references and ways of preparing tea to produce a certain quality. However, I stopped when I found out a small reference about the tea produced in Tanzania, which had its origin in German colonisation.

I know the context nowadays is complicated to speak about such part of history and without ignoring the consequences of such occupation, I would like to focus on a small part of it: the introduction of tea.

As with most European countries (see there), Germany developed an approach based on an Agricultural Research Station in Anami that was grounded in 1902 and taken over by the British in 1920 when they were awarded that part of the former German East Africa. Although this research centre had a good reputation (for coffee or for its botany garden) as stated by William Nowell, new Director of the East African Agricultural Research Station “As you are all doubtless aware, we occupy the site and buildings of the Biological and Agricultural Institute, founded in 1902, which under the direction of the late Dr. Zimmermann rendered most valuable services to the colony of German East Africa. […] but we inherited a valuable library, a considerable herbarium, and plantations stocked with introduced economic plants.” (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Arts, Dominion and Colonies Sections from 24th October, 1933), the British fired all its personal, probably out of fear that they would not be loyal to the Crown (the kind of things that was important in those years).

It seems that the first tea was planted in 1904 but didn’t leave the realm of experimentations before the second half of the 1920s (a recurring problem in these research stations be they in India or in Indochina is how long it took from experiments to real “commercial” use, perhaps a topic for another time). To increase the spread, a tea officer was appointed (I still need to find out what this is) and free seeds were given between 1930 to 1934 with a tea factory opening in 1930.

In 1934, 1,000 ha had been planted, producing 20 tons of processed tea, of which 9.3 were exported (Carr et al. 1988, Tea in Tanzania, Outlook on Agriculture, 17:18-22). I do wonder what happened to the remaining 10.7 tons. Were they drank in Tanzania? This seems quite unlikely.

The outbreak of World War II brings us another information as because of the presence of many German settlers (which must have returned after World War I or decided to remain), the British government decided to dispose them of their estates, which were acquired by a subsidiary of Brooke Bond, an English tea brand famous for PG Tips). The land must have been good for tea as the company began to plant more tea (the final results being that in 2010 29,000 tons produced of which 28,000 were exported).

However and surprisingly enough, some Germans were still there as I found out that a Mr Voigt, last (probably because of its age but I couldn’t find any other information on that part) German tea grower in the area retired in 1986 after 60 years living in Tanzania. He even wrote a book about his life, 60 Years in East Africa: Life of a Settler 1926 to 1986. I guess it contains some information on these plantations and how they fared through the years and could be compared to similar experience from British settlers in Kenya or Assam around the same time.

The question I didn’t answer was how did I learn about the grading of Japanese beef. Did you see my title? It is from a classical 1968 war movie with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood about a “secret traitor” stuff and I thought it fitted the topic of this post to a T, so I selected it.

What? I didn’t answer the beef question… Let’s save it for another time.

Are they all doing the same?

May 31, 2020 / / 2 Comments

Innovation is a big word, one that is used all around us. All companies need to innovate to thrive or we all need to use the latest and most innovative concept/app/product…

It is a kind of buzz word and is all over the place.

I made a quick survey and found out for innovation and tea a lot of articles or even white papers presenting more or less the same thing: on the one hand, “innovations” to harvest/produce) tea, which more or less meant mechanising it one way or another or doing it with less human people and on the other hand innovation on the drinking side with new machines, new mixes, more information available for the customer, more small producers available on the market, more focus on health, making each experience unique…

You will probably think that I am mixing a bit of everything but what I only did was putting together some pieces written by several people (sometimes as advertising or because it is how their brand is working) and seeing that some themes keep on repeating themselves.

And don’t worry I do think that most of these companies are working along these lines and believing in the extra little bit they can bring to the customer.

Does this sound familiar to you? If not, I would sum it up as a focus on better products with higher quality and experience that are being sold at a higher price. This is part of a trend that runs through the entire food industry.

One example in another drink market is the famous 3 waves of coffee (I even read about a 4th one going on). It seems that the tea industry (but also other products) is following the same trend and path.

Why is that? Is there another way? What is theory (both marketing, economical…) saying about innovation and how can we relate it to tea? Why is that most focus is given to certain innovations and not others?

This will be the focus of my next articles.

But before I leave you, I would like to give you a hint by Clayton Christensen, an academic and consultant that focused on disruptive innovation (i.e. those that allow a company to create a new market, changing the entire market), “a sustaining innovation makes better products that you can sell for better profits to your best customers.”

Does this ring a bell? Yes, you just need to read what I wrote a little above that everything and everyone follow the same pattern and the same ideas… if they do so it is because it is a good way to sell better products for a better profit at customers and isn’t business all about money?

Light! More Light!

March 30, 2020 / / 0 Comments

I think that Goethe’s last words are more than suited to this rather obscure topic that I teased last time, tea in French Indochina. But perhaps I should start with some explanations for those unfamiliar with the history/geography of the world at the beginning of the 20th century.

French Indochina was the result of a process beginning in the middle of the 19th century with a series of military expeditions earmarked as punitive expeditions by France and Spain, leading to the occupation of the South of Vietnam and in 1887 to the creation of the Union of French Indochina.

Administrative map of French Indochina in 1937

Administrative map of French Indochina in 1937. Showing protectorates and provinces/districts by XrysD

Because of the distances involved and France not being overpopulated, this colony was seen as an economic one and not as a settlement one, meaning that “few” French went there and that the exploitation of natural resources was the priority (with most of the funding coming from taxes on the local people through monopoly on important products). For example, rice was the biggest exported product of French Indochina (both in volume and value), something that was unheard before (mostly because the former government and local people had no use for this kind of sales of goods but this is another topic, one that would lead us too far away from tea).

During the Roaring Twenties, France intended to diversify the French Indochina economy with the introduction of several new commodities to be produced but the Great Depression hurt it like in most colonies as the decline in prices and in exports meant less resources while the cost remained the same.

Rice Fielf by Halong Bay

Rive Field by Halong Bay by Dinkum

But let’s not get too quickly to the end of the story.

As I said earlier, while looking for information on this topic, I found several old books and among them the Bulletin of the Economic Agency of Indochina, the representatives in France of the Governors-Generals of French Indochina acting also as a centre of information on said region, of promotion or of research on different topics. I accessed the Bulletins from 1928 to 1937 (I don’t know if it was published before (I have some doubts as it displays a 1st year mark followed by “new series”) or after) looking for information on tea as it was quite often filled with articles on politics, on agriculture in the different provinces as well as analysis of the economical situation in the area or in the potential markets around it (like the Dutch East Indies known today as Indonesia) or a little further away (Poland). Obviously, the different Bulletins are written in a style and with ideas that are so 20s-30s but they are quite interesting.

From 1928 to 1933, it was edited every month and from 1934 on, it became quarterly, making it 76 issues of it In 43 of them, I found at least one article on tea, ranging from production statistics to full analysis of the tea sector in French Indochina or to news about foreign markets (including India and Ceylon).

Banknote from the Bank of Indochina

Banknote from the Bank of Indochina

Before I get into more details about the bigger picture, here are some interesting/puzzling facts:

– tea at that time was still painted/flavoured by chemical products, be it in China or in French Indochina. Perhaps it was also done in other places?

– there seems to be some forgery of what is tea with the addition of other plants and herbs (with those guilty being obviously according to the Bulletin the foreign intermediaries) . The solution was to work on a kind of label (“Appellation d’Origine” in French), an idea that is still valid today.

– there were two kinds of producers: the natives (small gardens) and the French ones with bigger gardens with different processing methods.

First thing, if you read For all the tea in China: Espionage, Empire And The Secret Formula For The World’s Favourite Drink by Sarah Rose (I look at a specific aspect of it, here), you might remember that there were experimental stations in most colonies to experiment and help with the spread of new plants and techniques.

French Indochina had some and they experimented with tea plans but for an unknown reason stopped doing so in 1910 before getting back to it from 1922 on. Their work focused on the best species to be used (although this statement written in 1933 is in contradiction with something else written two years ago in the Bulletin, see a little further below) and they had 14 varieties under supervision in 1919, 24 in 1923 and 70 in 1933 but also on the best way to “design” a garden (with shadow, without, with other trees, the use of fertilizers…) or the way to process tea leaves.

For example, the plots shadowed by chine wood oil trees gave 932 kg of fresh leaves per hectare when shadowed and 1,306 when not; with copperpods, the results were respectively of 807 and 1,087. Without any further indication about the differences between the plots, one can’t drawn any further conclusions.

The main areas of production seemed to have been in almost all French Indochina but mostly (and without surprise) in the areas with hills like those of Quang Nam (a name that came back as a good producing area over the whole time period).

However, in spite of what had been written about the experimental stations, two “species” of tea trees were used and seemed according to the authors native to French Indochina (but see above): Thea sinensis Sims and Thea assamica Mast.

The production was split in two with the gardens of the native, with few access to factories to process in an industrial way their leaves (they did it by hand) and a few French gardens, owned either by some settlers or some companies selling teas in France (perhaps a research for another post?), which had full access to one of the three factories I found references to (but there might have been more of them).

What about the productivity? In Annam from a tea tree, you could extract 600 to 800 grams of green leaves, of which 4 kilos were needed to produce 1 kg of saleable tea (made of 60% of the thin quality and 40% of big leaves or waste). At the same time, the production in Java or India was of 600 to 1,000 kg of saleable tea per ha. Since I have no clue about the density of the tea trees in the gardens in Annam, I can’t do the maths. If you have any information, I will edit this part.

In the end, what was the overall production of French Indochina? I am not sure we can say anything but here are some numbers I could find (which might be a bit biased and would need to be checked with other sources).

The crest of Saigon from 1870 to 1975

The crest of Saigon from 1870 to 1975

The tea produced by the natives seems sometimes to have been only for their own consumption but at other times, they are said to be selling it… The truth is probably that they drank some of it but that they also sold it to either the trading firms, the factories or the above mentioned intermediaries. However every year around 2,000 tonnes of tea were imported from China for the use of the native upper class, of the Chinese and of the European. This seems a bit much and my feeling is that part of it might have been just in transit to Europe under the label of Indochina tea (but this is just a gut feeling with no proof to back it).

However, since my sources here were in a way official, I got the numbers of tons exported (at 80% to France) each year over most of the period. I hope you are well seated because the figures are a bit like a roller-coaster with no real explanations for now.

Year Tons exported Year Tons exported
1902 163 1916 918
1903 168 1917 862
1904 327 1918 1,039
1905 224 1919 903
1906 328 1920 357
1907 368 1921 156
1908 306 1922 508
1909 325 1923 878
1910 530 1924 756
1911 559 1925 103
1912 436 1926 1,148
1913 372 1927 776
1914 490 1928 937
1915 963 1929 1,012

Tons of tea exported from French Indochina (in tons per year)

I also got the value in French Francs for the second half of this table but since it wasn’t complete, I didn’t use it here.

After this “short” introduction, I will try to go through other documents I found online to see if I find more information to share with you or to see if I can find more about the names and whereabouts of the tea companies involved in this business and this area. But this will be for a later article.

The only one stuck is the last one

November 29, 2019 / / 0 Comments

According to the Times of India in its edition of October 17th of 2019, the Tea Board of India wanted to meet the producers of Darjeeling teas to “propose 100% mandatory sales […] via auction” and more importantly via e-auctions.

The reasons are threefold:
1. Traceability of this Geographical Indication product, since according to a Board official “2 million kilograms produced in a neighbouring country is unlawfully imported and mixed to be passed on as Darjeeling tea”. Forcing every grams of Darjeeling tea to be sold through e-auctions would facilitate the process of tracing them back to where they are produced, ensuring only real Darjeeling tea is being sold on the market.
2. Make the business profitable by avoiding undue competition and price undercutting by the different gardens.
3. Transparency, meaning that it is common knowledge how much a tea kilogram is being sold and if the gardens can or cannot pay bonus to the labourers.

Before seeing if these goals are “good” or not or if they are reachable, let us begin with what is an e-auction and what would be the consequences of it.

An auction is the process of selling and buying through bids and to the highest bidder. It is only one of the several ways of buying and selling goods. E-auction is the same but using the potential offered by the information technologies to open the system to more people and more often without any of them needing to move.

Now, what are the advantages of launching such a program?
Many studies exist on the peculiarities of auctions and e-auctions but most of them relate to the use of game theory or to analyse how the bids are done according to the access of the bidders to information. I found a paper by Rajiv Banker and Sabyasachi Mitra in Electronic Commerce Research and Applications Volume 6, Issue 3, Autumn 2007, Pages 309-321, on Procurement models in the agriculture supply chain: a case study of online coffee auctions in India.
After reading it, I found it quite interesting as it is a practical case study on another agricultural commodity (I didn’t know that India produced coffee) in the same country and with the same target/idea.
According to Rajiv Banker and Sabyasachi Mitra, the direct online auctions allow for increased margins for both sides due to direct purchases and to lower costs of participation as the auctions tale place more regularly. Among the drawbacks are the lack of capacity to see the product and its quality as well as the direct contacts between planters and buyers, with a bargaining power that might be unbalanced between the two of them (because of one party having more knowledge or more money or more …).

However, something else caught my attention in this paper since it went directly against the second goal set by those promoting the e-auctions (and remember we are talking about coffee beans).
The price of the beans seemed higher by 4% in the electronic auction with an even higher price difference for the grades with less trading frequency or with higher price volatility. However, the premium coffee grades, those which might need to be seen and touched to check their quality were usually sold at a lower price at the electronic auction.
Why is that important? Because we are talking about Darjeeling teas, the “champagne” of teas, which means that these teas are supposed to be of higher quality as most and sold according to this idea. If the same “problem” is found in tea e-auctions as in coffee ones, this might cause a drop in prices, leading to planters being unwilling to sell their products at these auctions (for fear of prices not being high enough) and therefore buying them back in order to be allowed to sell it to peculiar buyers after direct negotiations (this is allowed in the process).
This can be seen in a positive way as for upper grades teas to be sold through e-auctions would mean to be 100% sure of the quality, leading to a rise in the quality of the production while everyone would try to offer only the best products possible to ensure a long-lasting rise in the price even without the classical checking of the teas being sold; however, it also means that only those with a well-established “name” or with enough money will be able to do so at first. My personal opinion here is that this would go against the will of the promoters of the e-auctions.

Now that we have a clearer idea of what is going on under the name e-auction, will they help reach the three goals I mentioned at the beginning? The answers below are just my answers and nothing else.

1. Traceability: perhaps the e-auctions could help enforce it but if and only if there is a way to track the whole production chain (perhaps through an increased control on the quantity being produced in each garden). Otherwise, smugglers with the help of other partners will find ways around the controls and the situation will remains the same.
2. Profitability: yes as long as quality stays and as long as there is a demand for these type of products at a said price. If some big buyers do not want to go that way and just withdraw, the market will revert to its current practices with a higher risk of undercutting prices at the second negotiations, since the bargaining power between a big buyer and a garden is likely to be unbalanced.
3. Transparency: it will depend on how many kilograms are sold on the open market through these auctions and how many gardens buy back their teas for private negotiations (we can imagine some big buyers even lending money to gardens to do that).

Are e-auctions a good thing for tea? For me there is no definitive answer and it will all depend on what the rules of the game are and how all the players stick to the rules.

One never knows how loyalty is born

October 22, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Why is Earl Grey/Green Tea/… popular and proposed/drank in most places? How do trends begin? Good questions indeed. When I was asked about it, I began doing some research and I found some information on how trends were born in fashion. After looking and thinking about it, I decided that it could translate into the tea industry.

So how are trends born? Humans being social animals, we are “victims” of several documented phenomenons that facilitate the adoption of “successful” behaviours. First, the bandwagon effect increase the probability of an individual adopting a belief, idea, trend with the proportion of people who have already done so. The other effect is named the chameleon one after the animal that is said to blend into its environment. However it is a bit trickier as some works and experiences say that some people try to follow the choices made by others, ie the norm, however some others say that some people try to do the exact opposite trying to do what no one does. This shows that the human mind is quite complex but that we always compare ourselves to others and that we are influenced by others in a way or in another.

These factors explain how trend/fashion spreads among individual people, be it for fashion, food stuff or tea and today, you could add advertising (whatever the way it takes), economical situation (with the need for ones to distinguish themselves from others be it by looking for luxury products or rather upper class ones), technology (making production available at cheaper prices, thus increasing the potential market)… and today also social media, which are in a way mega-advertising things, with several people known as influencers (celebrities, people with an audience and recognised for their expertise in a domain…). However, they don’t really explain how trends are born and what makes them appear.

First and foremost, it is important to understand that like in the spreading part, we are not alone to decide. “We” as people have tastes but sometimes we don’t know about them and companies are eager to “help” us find about them before we knew what we want, creating a market and ensuring they can sell us what we need.

To do so, companies do a lot of research on what their customers might want, either directly through market researches, asking group of people about what they want, what they value the most… or looking at researches made by others. One interesting example I found and that might be reflected in the tea industry too is the brand design agency. These people are paid to feel the air and look at what the next ideas in a certain industry might be and this at different moments in time (tomorrow, the day after tomorrow…). They produce trend books that are sold at a high price to other companies that make the fashion collections we see in the shops.

You might wonder how this is related to us and to the way trends in tea are created. If you are referring to normal brand design agencies, it is only in an indirect way as their books display not only all the things needed to create a fashion collection (colours, designs, key words and concepts) but also a lot of other things that are in the air and that can be translated in concepts for other industries. In a more direct way, some of these agencies are focusing on other industries (food, cars, cosmetics…).

Obviously, some companies are able to do this job all alone, be it because they are big enough to have a department doing the same thing or because they have someone with the talent to perceive the future trends. To quote Steve Jobs (I couldn’t write on this topic without making a reference to him), “It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do. So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.”

As in most things in life, there is no simple answer to any question and the way how trends begin and spread is a complex one, a non written and non spoken deal between us as consumers and the companies selling tea (or any other thing) with the addition of people trying to find out about what we might need and our unconscious trying either to make us look like all the others or trying to differentiate us. This is why there is no winning combo to ensure ones success and also why there are so many companies following the lead of others: it is easier to find out what works and do it too, rather than try to find out what is going on. However, this only works because customers are loyal to a brand or to a couple of brands and are unwilling most of the time to widen their experience and look around.

This echoes to the title of this blog, which is a quote of Mad Men, a TV show I still have to look at that focuses on the life and business of advertising agencies throughout the 1960s.

A chain that doesn’t block anything

April 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I heard on radio last week that big names in the food industry were going for something that up to now for me was something more linked to cryptocurrency (yes I know it sounds horrible but I am sure you have heard of bitcoins) than to anything food related: the blockchain.

For those like me that don’t really know what it is, blockchain is a succession of encrypted blocks containing information on something and linked to the previous block in the chain and to the next one by small parts of code, securing the whole chain and most importantly the data within.

What is the use of it for people that have nothing to do with geeks? With a simple QR reader downloaded on your smartphone, you can have access to this whole information by just flashing the QR code.

You will probably ask what kind of information. The example I heard on radio was in the mashed potatoes industry. With this specific blockchain, they wanted the customer to be able to know which factory processed the potatoes and even which operators did it (or checked the machines used).

I am sure that by now you see some processes where the tea industry could use this blockchain. The first and foremost would be to track down where exactly the tea we are drinking comes from. This would help solve some “mysteries” or uncertainties regarding the place of origin of some teas. A second use would be to be able to know what happened to the tea during the fabrication process, just to be sure that everything is as it is supposed to be. A third use would be to be able to follow the tea from the plucking to the store, not only through space but also through time, meaning that there would be no question regarding the way, the means of transport, the freshness of a tea.

For example, people could buy fresh tea from Japan knowing that it was transported by cargo plane. Thanks to this, the consumer could act according to his principle and buy only products that follow his/her own sets of rules.

Obviously this blockchain thing only works if everyone along the chain (from producers to sellers) is playing the game but with enough pressure for the consumers, it should not be a problem as companies are more than willing and eager to be transparent regarding their products.. What is more problematic is the capacity to check the veracity of the information provided by the whole chain. As producers are spread in different countries and sometimes deep inside them, it might be difficult for them to invest time in blockchains or for third parties to check whether or not the provided information is the right one.

One solution could be in the use of trusted and independent middlemen in charge of checking the information related to tea or even bringing them in the blockchains. To ensure their total independence, they should not be funded by the sellers but by the customers. It might be a little bit costly (but I doubt it) but it would enable the move of the tea industry to another level of transparency and cooperation. The idea here is not to create a new “thing” (if I may quote de Gaulle) but a simple yet efficient tool that could be used across the whole tea industry to improve it through the sharing of information.

Don’t get me wrong, in spite of this rational approach focusing, I also do think that mysteries and myths are a part of the charm of tea. Quite an intriguing approach, isn’t it? Or to quote a man who is on our side: “The duality of man. The Jungian thing, sir.”

I had a dream

February 28, 2019 / / 2 Comments

I read a few weeks ago about a museum that a famous French designer (Yves Saint Laurent) had two museums exhibiting his work, his inspirations and some of his notebooks with drawings of dresses he made or inspirations he had. This made me think about how things could shake down the “old house” and bring some fresh and new air in tea. After all, tea is not only for old ladies.

Inspired by what I saw on the Internet about mode and art, I began thinking about something that would do the same for… yes, tea (I know I wrote it two lines above but I wanted to write it down once more just in case you might have missed it) and how it would look like. I know of some exhibits that did that in the past in several towns (and I might have missed some of them in my look around) but I wanted to improve them and to build something new.

Obviously, there should be a drinking and informative space to allow people to discover where it comes from and what it really is. I know that there are many nice pictures or info/data on tea production, processing and consumption. This could help break some mythos or as some would say some “fake news” that are for tea unfortunately floating like leaves in the stream. However since this is not the main topic in this post I will not elaborate but most of them have to do with health benefits.

I would also add a part with “real” plants if I could say so. I do not think we could make any tea out of them but showing the real thing is always a good idea, as people do not know quite often, what they are dealing with.

However the main thing as I intended to say in the first sentences would be notebooks or old books (I saw many of them on the Internet) showing the ideas behind the blends or the minds at work. There are lot of people around here blending tea and making different things out of it. This kind of alchemy is perhaps what sets tea apart from coffee and properly done it could be the highlight of a museum. I wrote alchemy because for most people, this is what it looks like. For others, it is more a try and fail process that in the end brings something together.

Obviously, there is commercial secrecy around these recipes but I am more interested in the overall creative process than in the final product. Perhaps there could be temporary exhibits split along different brands with some notebooks, pictures… written or made specifically for it or made by specific artists in collaboration with different creators/artists…

This part of the creation process is unknown by other people out of the business and deserves more advertising. As I said earlier, this creation of a blend is a mix of art and craft, something unique that could open the eyes of people, enlightening their smell and increasing their willingness to taste new things.

After these first exhibits and after having found the strengths and weaknesses of the overall idea, the same organisational principle is to be used with other things like “pure” teas or how people in the smaller gardens and/or in the more creative ones are doing sometimes quite unorthodox things. If you need to see what I am talking about, just look at some of the findings of Lazyliteratus over here.

There are always new things to wonder about and to show to the curiosity of people. Displaying the creativity of the industry, an industry that always is on the move towards new things, is a good idea to attract people to this “museum”.

The real problem is more how to duplicate things all over the world as tea comes and goes from different places, it is not like designs that is linked to a peculiar city. There are two possibilities, duplicating things all around the world in different cities or places or making a travelling expo that would stay in one place or in another for as long as necessary.

Both have their pros and cons but for now I will get back to my dreaming state and let the wings of my tea museum dream unfold as I had a dream…

On the road again

January 31, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes economists like to develop their concepts in what seems to be a sandbox way before applying them to reality to check if they are worth anything. When I say in a sandbox way, I mean based on certain hypotheses that to other people can seem completely out of reality. But this is how it works; since economics focuses on the way economic agents interact and behave and because these economic agents are complete beings and things, you need in order to study them to “simplify” things and to see then how what you found out works in real life.

One example is the work of Johann Heinrich von Thünen, a German nineteenth century economist that developed a mathematical formula to know what was the best use (in terms of production type) for a piece of land based on the transport costs to a market and the rent a farmer could afford (based on the yield of a given product, its selling price and its costs of production). Of course there are “weaknesses” or simplifications as I said earlier. For example, the differences in transportation costs, in topography, in soil fertility or the changes in price/demand were not taken into account in this simplified but quite important model.

I am sure you are now wondering why I am speaking of this right now and if the economics part of teaconomics has taken control of my writings.

But not at all. You will have to be patient for a little while before seeing where I want to go.

As I said, Johann Heinrich von Thünen didn’t take into account the differences in transportation costs and their impact on the overall chain. These differences can come from three sources: differences in infrastructures, efficiency of transport companies and different means of transport but they will have different impacts on the transport chain and thus on the best place to implement such and such resources (at least in his model).

What is the link between all this and tea? The answer is in the title of the song Hit the road Jack, transport. This is the reason why colonial empires devised and created transport networks to insure that the production of the colonies (mostly commodities) would get to the mainland as quickly, as cheaply and as efficiently as possible (okay, they also wanted to get their soldiers where needed as quickly and as efficiently as possible).

This is what was seen in tea too as earlier, you needed to get the freshest tea on market and to be the first to land in let’s say London. This is why clippers, the fastest sailing ships were built (before being becoming irrelevant because of steam and the Suez Canal (a new transport infrastructure)) and used to transport light and valuable cargo that needed to reach the ports as quickly as possible (tea, opium, people…). Today this trend is still alive for some teas (first-flush Darjeeling for example), planes are used in order to get them as fast as possible to the market.

Tea Clipper Foochow – sand painting by Brian Pike

But every journey begins with a first step. For tea, it is simple you need to get it from where the gardens/factories are to where the customers are, which means getting them out of the mountains/hills/remote locations where they are most of the time situated and then through the cities and/or the oceans. Unfortunately (or not), we are not playing in a sandbox and thus the model developed by von Thünen can’t be used right away to place tea gardens there, factories somewhere else and cities (or markets) in a third place. As with most human related things, we have to deal with how nature and humanity interacted over the centuries, creating a complicated and not always efficient network.

You will ask why does it matter? What do I as a customer get from an efficient transport system built around efficient infrastructures (one of the first steps for an efficient transport system)?

Let me tell you that the overall efficiency of any transportation system can make a lot of difference. For example, according to the World Trade Organisation World Trade Report 2004 (p.119) that quoted an article by the Economist, the poor road infrastructure in Cameroon increased the production costs of beer by 15 per cent and then you had to add the transportation costs to every place in the country. This meant that a beer costing 1 in Douala by the sea would cost 1.3 in an eastern village.

Now imagine this applied to a commodity that needs to be shipped through a country and then to another one far, far away (it seems a bit like the beginning of a fairytale, doesn’t it?). Based on the previous ratio (which might or might not be a bit too much for tea), it would mean paying tea at a much higher price. For a production process that has been refined over hundreds of years with as I said a focus since the beginning on exportation like India, it seems rather unlikely. However, it was a problem a few years ago at least in some parts of the country with two major impacts: difficulties to get supplies in and difficulties to get tea out.

Is it still the case today? I read that investments have been made with a special focus on this topic but only time and experience from people in the country will tell us how things have evolved and will evolve.

Look into the eyes…

October 29, 2018 / / 0 Comments

No, don’t look at me but look at him below.

Freud circa 1921

I am sure you are now really scared and ready to tell me everything and anything but don’t worry. I won’t ask too many things.

My topic today is more about clichés, “projections” or things we expect and so on.

So let’s think for one minute at your three favourite Western (by this I mean European or American) tea companies Now go on their websites or on their publications… Don’t you see a pattern or something in common (apart from the obvious teas they might have in common)?

No? Really? Well, my bet is that in 2 from these 3, you will find hints about someone exploring the wild (or not so wild) world to find the best or rarest teas. And if it is not someone exploring, it is the experience of the taster-in-chief.

You don’t need to worry, this isn’t a tropism linked only to tea, it is much worse in coffee but let’s try to stay on tracks.

What does this tell us? The obvious answer is that they really do explore the world. Let’s just assume for the purpose of my analysis that it is true. To be honest, the ideas developed afterwards are still valid even if they don’t sail the 7 seas).

Why is it so important? Because for us, it means this explorer hand-picks only the best leaves and teas for us, leading us to believe that the products of this company are the best.

However, I think it runs a little deeper than that. For me, the explorer bringing tea home is an archetype, i.e. a constantly recurring symbol that makes us think of the same things, even if it is at an unconscious level.

The explorer going in the unknown to bring the best of these countries to Europe is a cliché of colonial times when some people were doing this (or glorifying themselves about it, a bit like Tartarin de Tarason), more were thinking they could do so and even more were imagining things about these lands and the products brought to them.

All this created a mythology, which got into the collective imagination in Europe and America and that shows into this explorer image.

But you might ask ok it is a stereotype but why does it matter to companies?

It is all about trying to differentiate one brand from another but at the same time totally failing to do so because we are all excepting the same thing. But I am getting a little bit too quickly here.

The brand is the identity of a company or of a product but what are its effects? According to Kotler in Principles of marketing,. Pearson Education Australia (2009), a brand identity is built around attributes, benefits, values and personality.

Attributes are the values, things that a company wants to be identified by. Benefits are what the customers get from these attributes (the generated satisfaction), values is quite self-explicatory as is personality.

If one thinks about a company putting in the first row of its advertising or of its corporate message, the explorer getting in the wild world to bring back the best unknown products, the picture is quite obvious. Such company would want to promote exoticism, unicity, high quality and adventure. The customers buying his products from such a company would value the quality of their products but also their uniqueness, allowing them to feel like this only because of unconscious clichés going back to the old times.

If 2 out of 3 companies promote these images, why aren’t they trying to be more innovative in their branding approach? Simply because it works. It is sad but it is so. If you have something that works or that might work, you will not feel the need to go explore new territories. This protective and conservative approach is when you think about it quite opposed to the image the tea companies want to promote.

Before I conclude, you might ask: what is the link between this post and Freud. Some of you might have even thought that I was going to make a psychoanalysis of tea drinkers and you were probably disappointed. Freud came to me when I began gathering different elements before writing. He is not the inventor of the archetypes but the pictures of Carl Gustav Jung that I could find were far less scary than this one and I wanted to frighten you (no Halloween had nothing to do with that).

Unsung hero

August 29, 2018 / / 2 Comments

We all know about Robert Fortune and the British East India Company (for a really small summary, you can look there) in the spreading of tea from China to India (I will not go on the topic about the different Camellia sinensis varieties and their origins).

We all know that he went through a lot of efforts to find the tea bushes, to bring them to the coast, to ship them to India and then to Darjeeling.

I say through a lot of efforts as even at that time, sailors, warehousemen, customs officials… (but not botanists or should I say not all of them) knew few things or cared not about the way to take care of plants, seeds, resulting in heavy losses like the ones suffered by the first delivery Robert Fortune made as of the 10,000 seeds sent 100% had rotten and of the 13,000 young plants and only 80 were healthy enough to try to thrive in their new home.

And this result was achieved in spite of the use of up-to-date technology from Victorian times, the real unsung hero of the tea adventure: the Wardian case.

What is a Wardian case? It is a sealed container protecting the plants or the seeds that needed to be protected from salt, moisture… yet at the same time needed light, water… because it is a living being that can’t live without food, water, solar light. Through its glass top, it allowed the light to get in and the closed container allowed humidity to develop, humidity that gave the plants the water they need.

The name comes from its inventor Dr Ward, a physician interested in botanic. He made in 1829 an experiment with a glass bottle and some moths and seeds; the final result being that plants could live/grow (okay not like in wild nature but enough for other uses). Since at that time, the different European powers were all looking for ways to develop their colonies with new agricultural products (a trend that began the first time that someone somewhere saw a fruit and managed to bring it back alive to its own country), the Wardian case seemed perfectly suited to give an answer to this difficult problem: how to bring alive the seeds or plants.

Sometimes as with tea, this exportation of new agricultural products to a country was done through smuggling, because one country (China, France, the United Kingdom…) didn’t want to lose its competitive advantage by allowing someone else to produce the same products they had. This too is a really long story that can be seen in the history of the spice trade once the European managed to get into the Indian Ocean (for an example of this, you can look at the history of Mr Poivre (Pepper in French and yes, it was his true name))..

This case was not using any breaking technology but Dr Ward was the first one to reduce the scale of a greenhouse, freeing it from the need to add extra heating and water, as his case was self-regulated.

To be perfectly honest, Dr Ward might not have been the first to have the idea or to experiment with it (according to some a Scottish botanist might have created one around a decade earlier but I couldn’t find more than a tenuous reference) but he was the first to publish (if you want to protect your inventions, get a patent or publish) and he found an associate in Mr Loddiges, owner of a well-known plant nursery in London that traded with the whole world (it pays to have friends), which helped him spread the use of his invention with for example the shipping of plants from Australia to England in 1833 with almost all of them surviving.

This was what Robert Fortune used like so many others for sending his findings be them plants or seeds and an invention that was instrumental in bringing tea from China to India.

And after this explanation, you might wonder why the Wardian cases failed the first time. The explanation is simple: human curiosity. Custom officials eager to know what was so special about these cases did the only thing that shouldn’t have been done: break the seal and open the cases, breaking the process.