Category: Market

Who needs a strategy for picking new teas?

May 29, 2016 / Xavier / 2 Comments

I was a few days ago in Germany in a tea shop/saloon (or lounge as they called it) and I went through their catalog to see what they had in stock and to compare their newest teas and blends with what I had seen in France (for example a rise in Oolong coming from “exotic” countries). Surprisingly enough, I didn’t have that feeling, although I went to “big” names on each national markets.
This made me curious about how these companies select their new products and those that come to market.

There is always the history that someone (the founder, the explorers…) made some discovery and brought them to us, the customer.
It can be true but it is more likely to happen in smaller companies than in bigger ones as people in bigger companies have too many things to do to just get lost somewhere and find a hidden jewel.
An other explanation came to my mind when I started considering each “big” or medium-sized tea company as a brand .

You know brand right? They are the little communication tools that allows one company to be differentiated from another. Usually, you would think of brands through mundane things such as logo, name…; however, they also generate a lasting impression on their customers and potential customers, because they are known, because they have values, because friends talked about it, because of the packaging…
For example, TeeKampagne is specialised in selling Darjeeling at an affordable price and in a sustainable system. Obviously, should this company sell flavoured tea, its customers would be lost and wouldn’t understand what is going on, resulting in decreasing sales.
And this is true for every company, even if most will state that they try to “bring you the best teas from all around the world” or something along that, which means that you will expect them to sell you all kinds of tea.

Once a company has a more or less clear definition of what it is supposed to make and sell, one of its strategies (a plausible one for the generalist company described above) is to enter new market segment with products they were not selling, in order to attract new customers with teas they will like or to increase the loyalty (ie the purchases) of existing customers by bringing them new experiences and new products.

This approach can be summarized through a simple example with a matrix with on one axe the width of the product mix, which means the basic categories and on another, the depth, displaying the different products sold in the different categories. The total number of products sold being the length of the product mix.
I must have lost you all, so I will write down a simple and fictional example.

Oolong	Black tea	Green tea
Taiwan	Darjeeling	Matcha
China	Lapsang Souchon	Korean
Flavoured with fig	Earl Grey	Darjeeling

So here, this company product mix has three different sorts of tea (Oolong, Black and Green), meaning a width of three and for each sort of tea, it sells three different products (a depth of three), which results in a length of the product mix of 9.
From its choices, it is obvious that this company is trying to “bring to your cup the best teas from all around the world” as it covers all the classical teas that most people know about from Darjeeling to Earl Grey while offering something for more demanding clients (Matcha, Oolong) or a few specific teas that might not be seen elsewhere (Oolong flavoured with figs, Lapsang Souchong).
This product line allows this company to experiment with different strategies that can be combined : go for one or more new non-flavoured teas, introduce more flavoured teas, create a new category with the introduction of herbal teas…

Now imagine this for your favourite tea companies and you might begin to understand why they decided to go for such or such products this year. This can go as far as launching a new category of upper quality teas or of more affordable teas.
All options are open as long as it doesn’t blur the message the company wants to sent to the customers. This is why new brands can be launched to focus on a specific new market that is totally alien to the original product line.
But this is another story.

Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black

April 23, 2016 / Xavier / 9 Comments

1919 Ford Model T Highboy Coupe photographed by User:Sfoskett

Everybody has heard this sentence by Henry Ford that is usually misunderstood to mean something like “we don’t care about customers, we know what they want”. The truth is that because of the development of assembly line (which allowed for a drop in price), black was the only colour that could be used because it dried quicker than any other.

Are customers taken into account in the tea industry and since when? To answer that question, we will have to travel to…

Austria… This name implies different things depending on your sensibilities.

Joseph Schumpeter

Portrait of Elisabeth in 1865 by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

For an economist, it rings a bell on Joseph Schumpeter and his “creative destruction” (something linked to economic innovation and business cycles) or the Austrian School (an approach of economy related to the motivations and actions of individuals).
For those more familiar with history or the crowned people, Austria means the Empress Elisabeth of Austria aka Sisi or Maria Theresa, an earlier Empress whose accession to the throne sparkled a war known as the War of Austrian Succession.

Portrait of Maria Theresa in 1759 by Martin van Meytens

None of this really seems linked to tea, even if Maria Theresa had a taste for Chinoiseries that you can see when visiting the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna (if you want to see a part of it, here is a 360° picture of one of the rooms http://www.schoenbrunn.at/fileadmin/content/schoenbrunn/panoramas/29_vieux_laque_zimmer.swf)

Which brings us to the main city of Austria, which I visited some times ago and was the subject of a blog post (http://teaconomics.teatra.de/2014/07/27/cause-im-tnt/), which for an obscure reason is now without my pictures. However, you might say and you will be right that in spite of everything I found there, Vienna is a coffee town.

However what brings me today in Vienna (at least on my keyboard) is something completely different and I am sure it will frighten some of you when you read my topic for today post: sociology and most specifically one of the major figures in 20th century American sociology: Paul Lazarsfeld.

Paul Lazarsfeld ©Bardwell press

This Austrian was a doctorate in mathematics and when he came to sociology in the 1920s-1930s, he brought to this field his expertise in mathematics and quantitative studies. Thanks to a study on the social impact of unemployment on a small community (Die Arbeitlosen von Marienthal) published in 1932, he attracted the attention of the Rockefeller Foundation and was invited for a two-years travelling fellowship to the USA. When the time to go home was there and because of the political climate in Austria (he was a Jewish and a socialist), he decided to stay in America, where he created an institute in Newark along the lines of his Vienna Research Centre. I will spare you the details but he created another one in Columbia, became a major figure on the impact and power of mass media (first radio) and created/experimented with several new and “modern” techniques like panel studies, mathematical models and an empirical approach to his studies that since the beginning and the Vienna years allowed him to get funds from private companies, a way to fund his institute at a time when Universities were not ready to support such a group.

Which brings me at least (at least for you reader) to tea.
One of these early sociological studies is named Tea and the Viennese or in German Der Tee und die Wiener was made in 1932. This study was commissioned by a coffee and tea importer company Julius Meinl that still exists today.

Julius Meinl logo over the years © Julius Meinl

A translation in English was made in 1934 for Rensis Likert’s students but it seems to have been lost and the only documents are in German and in the Lazarsfeld Archive at the University of Vienna. This means that I couldn’t get my hands on any original document and that I had to rely on secondary sources.

The goal of this study was to know why some Viennese drank tea and whether or not others could be “convinced” to drink tea, which meant in a city dominated like most Europe by coffee drinkers, a huge potential market.
According to the results, it seems that at that time people had no troubles speaking with researchers for long period of times, a situation rather unlikely nowadays.
353 tea drinkers were interviewed and the split is quite interesting: 63 were members of the working class, 166 of the lower middle class and 124 of the higher class. To further the knowledge, 288 people were asked about what they thought of specific words or sentences that could be used for tea and 1,749 others about what they drank and how often. This shows a rather complete approach to understand what motivate people.
All of them drank tea either barely each day or occasionally. The former was more common among the members of the working class while the later among the two other classes. However, something that set tea and coffee apart was that tea was drank all day long and its consumption increased as the day went on (while coffee was mostly drank in the morning).
A third of the Viennese tea drinkers came from a family where it was a customary beverage while the majority of them began drinking later on for three main reasons:
1. a conscious choice to do something different than in your previous life be it because of study, getting married, rebellion against their old life, new job…;
2. an external influence like wanting to be a part of something different, a smaller society with a higher social status;
3. an introduction to tea because of sickness and keeping with it.
Only one respondent, even in the Great Depression times, answered that her motivation was the lower cost of tea.

Even if this study was made 80 years ago, there are still some things that could be useful in it and knowing why people drank tea in these times is still an insight for us on who we are, why we drink tea and so on. Now the question that remains is do we drink tea for the same reasons or not? I will let everyone think about it and answer that question.

A mix of different theories

January 27, 2016 / Xavier / 6 Comments

Price… a huge topic and one on which much could be written on.
I already wrote a post on it but focusing on a “simple” question that @lahikmajoe had asked me: how can two companies sell the same product at different prices.
This time, it is @lazyliteratus that said something about the price of some teas here.

Price is different things depending on who you ask the question to.
For most of us, it is how much we are paying for something we get but for the other part (the seller), it is an income that should exceed the production and sales costs while for others, it is also a symbol of who you are (“I paid xxx for this, which makes me one of the happy few”).

How are prices formed?
On the one hand, they depend on their costs of production and sales, as no company (at least one that wants to stay in business or one with a decent accountant) would sell anything under these costs. If you disagree with this, you should speak to someone, like him.

Uncle Scrooge doing what he likes the most, checking that his products are sold at the right price and generate enough profit for him.

On the other, it depends on how much you or me, in other words us, the customer, are willing to pay for this little something we want to drink (I will stay with our favourite drink).
When the two meet, you have a price.

This is what microeconomics (the branch of economics that studies the behaviour of individuals and firms when they decide to allocate their limited resources) defines in other words as the supply and demand model, while giving us a nice graphic to illustrate it.

Supply and demand model by Paweł Zdziarski

Who said economics couldn’t make things simple and easy to understand? If I am honest and I am, I must say that there are some hypothesises behind this model that are making it a little more complex but we shall ignore them for now.

One of them is that this equilibrium is always dynamic.
As illustrated in this curve, a low price usually means a huge demand but less supply (see Uncle Scrooge) while a high price means a high supply but a low demand (once again I am not in the world of luxury products).
But overtimes, things change and new equilibriums are found while the market and the companies react to the price producing more to get their share of the high price (and thus contributing to it decreasing on the long run) or producing less to try to increase the price (and thus decreasing the demand for the good). The demand side works the other way around.

So in this perfect world, everyone adds their costs (which are different from one country to another, just think of the differences in labour costs), take a small margin (while staying perfectly on target with how much the customer is willing to pay. Such a nice picture.

There are two problems with that.
First of all, the willingness to pay depends on everyone as we don’t have the same “sensibility” to price (depending on our incomes, our past experiences, what we think of the product…). This complicates the “perfectly on target” thing making it a mix between science (with nice algorithms and big data) and art (educated guesses/feelings/knowledge/luck).
The second is that some of the tea production is sold via auctions, which means that sometimes it can be sold under its estimated price, or via futures contracts.
Future contracts?

Great Scott!

No, this has nothing to do with Back to the future but everything with rice. You have to thanks our Japanese friends for that as apart from making tea, they also invented in the 18th century this interesting financial tool and all of this because the samurai were paid by a mix of silver and rice. In order to secure stable incomes, a new trading tool was invented by which the parties agreed to buy and sell a certain amount of rice at a certain price and a certain time. If the price goes up during this time, it is all benefit for the buyer but if it goes down, it is good for the seller. In other words, if I agreed to sell you something at 10 and the market price goes up to 12, you managed to make a profit of 2 if you sell it again and if the market price goes down to 8, I made a profit of 2.

There are still a lot to say on prices but I think it will be enough for now.
So to sum it up, price, however it is determined is just the meeting of two minds: one willing to sell something for a determined amount of money and one willing to buy it at another determined amount. When the two agrees, there is a deal and a price.
It is simple as that.

Torture the data, and it will confess to anything

April 22, 2015 / Xavier / 4 Comments

My dear fellow Teatrader @thedevotea wrote a few weeks ago a post on a report about the increase in tea consumption in the world between now and 2019. His main complaint was that Australia didn’t make it to the top 20 of this list.

This is something rather unfair because there is a tea brand in this country that tries to change things out there (no name @thedevotea, no name).

When I read this post, I knew I had to write something about the report behind it.

I first looked at the tables available and wondered what was going on there until I noticed that it was all about market value and not consumption.

Now I got it.

So the overall tea market value in the whole world is going to increase in the 4 next years of a total of 32.56% (5.8% per year), with the situation being completely different from one country to another.

From a classical point of view, a market increases in value if it either:

– increases in volume while increasing/retaining its prices or not going through a huge decrease in prices,

– goes through an increase in price while keeping the same volume of sales.

An increase in volume on the tea market of a said country can mean several things. First of all, that the country population just grew or that people buy more tea or both of them at the same.

An increase in price can either mean a lack of supplies or an increase without any increase in quality (a monopoly or oligopoly situation), or with an increase in quality (new competitors coming to the market with better products, customers willing to get more for their money) leading customers to be ready to pay more for what they buy. This happens quite often when the incomes in one country rise.

The last option is a mix of both.

You can understand that the consequences of these different reasons are quite different in terms of what can be expected in the future for tea.

The situation will of course be different from one country to another.

Let’s try to do a guess on the top 20 growth rate found in the study and to categorize the different countries depending on the reasons behind their growth. Obviously, this analysis is 100% personal and subjective but it is based on my educated guess.

Since I don’t know everything about these countries so what is left blank are the topics I don’t know enough about to make an educated guess (but you can always give me the info I am lacking).

In order to try a bit more rigorous in my approach, I decided that the first two columns (increase of population and growth of average basket size) would be based on “hard” data, which means that the first one is based on the UN prospects while the second one is based on the tea consumption per capita and the position when compared to the world average.

Country	Increase of population	Growth of average basket size	Lack of supplies	Oligopoly situation	Increase in quality
China	Possible because of the sheer number of inhabitants	Unlikely, competition of coffee	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side	Unlikely, due to the number of local producers	Possible, will depend on the evolution of the competition with coffee but for the same reason, potential risk of a drop in quality.
United States	Unlikely	Possible, tea is a challenger	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side	Unlikely, due to the nature of the market	Possible, will depend on the content of the average basket and the rise of a tea culture among the youngsters (see Tea with Gary)
Morocco	Likely	Unlikely, already high	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Sri Lanka	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Japan	Unlikely	Unlikely, competition of other drinks	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side	Unlikely, due to the nature of the market	Due to competition with other drinks and tea products, potential risk of a drop in quality.
Panama	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Bolivia	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Rwanda	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Ecuador	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Ethiopia	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
South Korea	Unlikely	Possible, below world average per capita but with a possible diversification towards other drinks (developed country)	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side		Due to competition with other drinks and tea products, potential risk of a drop in quality.
Kenya	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Sudan	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Malaysia	Likely	Low probability, above world average	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Kyrgyzstan	Likely	Low probability, above world average	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Peru	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
United Kingdom	Unlikely	Unlikely, already among the world top tea drinkers per capita	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side	Unlikely, due to the nature of the market	Unlikely due to the consumption habits or only at the margin
Vietnam	Likely		Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Mongolia	Likely	Low probability, above world average	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side
Colombia	Likely	Likely, below world average per capita.	Unlikely unless massive change on the production side

As you can see, I don’t know enough to make a credible review of the 20 countries and I will let you conclude why these countries should (according to the original market analysis) experiment a rise in their tea market. But according to Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi, knowing that you know nothing is the beginning of wisdom, so I don’t worry about it, drink tea and think of myself as a wise man.

Who knows it might be true?

And since being wise is still compatible with being honest, I must confess that the title is not from me but from Ronald Coase, a British economist and writer.

Never say never

October 20, 2014 / Xavier / 6 Comments

I know I said that studies should be taken with caution but I found an interesting one and I wanted to share its conclusions with you.
This study shows that price tag can change the way people experience wine.

If you want, you can read it here or you can read my summary (with some short cuts as I am no neural sciences expert).
20 students (among them 11 males) who said they liked and occasionally drank red wine were asked to perform a test to “study the effect of sampling time on flavor” while they were performing another test.

Each one was told they would be tasting 5 different Cabernet Sauvignons, identified by price and put in a random order but there were only 3 different wines.

One of them was given its normal price tag, another its normal price and a lower one, and the last one its normal price and a higher one.

The final results were that the students could taste 5 different wines and that the more expensive ones tasted better.
I will spare you all the neural things but the obvious thing is that more research has to be done to see if experts will replicate these first results.

Let’s take a step back and think about the results and how they could be used for tea.

It would mean that for specific origins and flushes; the higher the price, the higher the pleasure to drink it.

I guess we won’t have any answer here unless someone made blind tastes with other people.
If you think tea is a normal product (ie with price defined by a cost-based approach), this is disturbing. However, if we think that some teas (not all of them) could in a way be considered luxury goods, then the picture changes and they partly become Veblen goods, goods whose demand is proportional to their price.

I said partly because only a few people will ever pay millions of Euros for some tea
What teas could fit into this pattern? My guess is that teas with a certain prestige around their name, teas with limited harvest each year could perfectly fit the bill.

This does not mean that we might pay too much each and every tea but that the high price of some teas will create the perfect conditions for our mind to believe we are drinking an awesome tea.
Sometimes our mind doesn’t mind playing a little fool trick on us but remember it is the one saying “Trust in me…”

‘Cause I’m TNT

July 27, 2014 / Xavier / 2 Comments

First I should confess that I should have written down the good tips @lahikmajoe wrote to me (http://lahikmajoedrinkstea.blogspot.fr/2010/07/wiens-teehandlung-schonbichler.html) as I had no Internet connexion while I was in Vienna but after coming back, it seems I did rather well.

I didn’t manage to find this nice tea shop/salon and after reading through his article once more I am quite saddened, even though I was even more saddened to discover that a place with such a promising aspect had moved to an unknown address a few years ago.

Anyway, while in Vienna, I made three discoveries : one is Haas und Hass (even if @lahikmajoe had talked about it and I remembered more or less where it was supposed to be), the second one is Café Schwarzenberg and the third one is the secret behind the title.

Haas und Haas is situated near the cathedral in Vienna and is both a shop for different specialities (tea, chocolate…) and a place where one can sit and have a morning tea, a high tea, an evening tea under the shadows of ivies.
I selected a Milky Oolong from their long list of teas and they did it right and on spot.
However a green tea (I don’t remember which one) was a bit too bitter, probably from a little too long in the water or from a little too much leaves (as I didn’t see the leaves, I can’t say).
From what the people around me had, I think the high tea thing was rather good.

Café Schwarzenberg is one of these classical, typical Vienna coffee houses with everything being where and how it should be.
The tea selection was not big but contained a little bit of everything and a mention that it was up to their customers to make the tea the way they wanted.
And then I got this…

What a shock.
Even if I couldn’t check the temperature (let’s be snobby for a couple of seconds), I got the feeling that everything was perfectly made and the cups of tea were perfect.

Now I am sure you are wondering what I found out and you will probably have guessed it has something to do with the title.
Vienna is full of coffee houses and I went to several ones, getting loose leaf tea in a paper filter (usually a Darjeeling) but it was always bitter and you know why?
Because it was fully loaded. I took a look at one of these filters and they were too heavy with between 4 and 5 g of tea for a medium teapot.
No wonder that it was too strong and that I couldn’t anything about it.

This is something that got me puzzled for some time now: why do people always try to put too much tea? Do they believe that they give us enough tea for our money? Do they believe that the stronger the better (like most people prefer a good cup of coffee)?

All that glisters…

December 28, 2013 / Xavier / 5 Comments

Following the guest post on my blog, I wanted to have a little more quantitative approach to the evolution of the American tea market.

So I looked for data from some sources and found something quite interesting at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO): all the tea imports between 1986 and 2011 for 5 countries (Canada, France, Germany, UK, USA).

Why these countries? To compare things between countries that are perceived as similar in terms of consumption but not in terms of history and relationships to the tea.

I reworked the stats a little (for example starting in 1991 to get the same data from all these countries) and here are the first results.

The USA imports more and more tea (43,000 tons more or over +50% in 21 years) whereas these tea imports drops in the United Kingdom (-13% but only a little over 23,000 tons less).

Even if their tea imports increased overtime, the 3 other countries I selected don’t play in the same league. With a little under 55,000 tons imported each year, Germany plays in the second league while with under 20,000 tons each year, Canada and France are obviously in the third one but all of them share something with the USA: the increase over the years ranging from +38% (France), +44% (Canada), +118% (Germany).

From this first analysis, we can conclude that the USA is a big tea importer and that if everything goes well for them, it could really soon beat their only rival, the United Kingdom.

The next question is what they make with all this tea.

And to know the answer (or a part of it), the question is where does all this tea comes from?

Below is a map that shows every country that exported tea to the USA even once between 1991 and 2011.

Seeing some rather exotic countries in the list like Greenland or some other small one is the joy of statistics on international trade.

This problem coupled with the low frequency of some of these trades doesn’t help us a lot. So I decided to eliminate those who had traded for less than 10 years over the period 1991-2011.

This map is a little more interesting but displays the countries where some companies are located or countries that re exported tea to the USA.

When focusing on those with an average export level of more than 1,000 tons per year, only a few countries are left with two kinds of countries: those re exporting what they brought (Great Britain and Germany) and those exporting directly.

These 11 countries exported in 2011 118,260 tons to the USA with Argentina being the first (50,034 tons) followed by China (26,335 tons) and India (12,564 tons).

What can we deduce from these elements?

Probably something that you all know that in spite or because of their huge imports, people in the USA (as a whole) do not drink high quality tea (I read that Argentinian tea was mostly used for bags and iced teas).

This is not a scoop but I suspect that there is a trend under this for higher/more exotic teas that could really change the way tea is perceived/drunk.

This will probably the next step in my analysis: find some value statistics and try to link them to those I already collected so that I can get a complete overview.

Tea time in America

December 8, 2013 / Xavier / 12 Comments

I was asked by people at Seattle Coffee Gear if I was interested in a post by them and among the subjects they were thinking of was “Tea in America”.

Since this topic is of interest to me, I gave a go ahead and I began searching myself to provide later a complementary look at it.

In other words, stay tuned but first let’s leave the floor to my guest.

“But the kettle’s on the boil

And we’re so easily called away

Hands across the water

Heads across the sky”

– Paul McCartney

Greetings from America, where it looks like we may (finally) adopt tea into our daily routine. Tea has come and gone from our culture several times based on availability, fashion and, of course, politics. It is time to dust of granny’s teapot, from all indicators, tea is here to stay.

With the recent purchase of the Teavana chain of stores, Starbucks is betting they can do for tea popularity what they did for coffee popularity. Teavana has over 300 stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico located in popular shopping mall locations. Starbucks has plans to expand and triple that amount. Currently Teavana sells teas and tea ware and some locations are being revamped to sell prepared food and beverages.

According to NPR, the wholesale value of tea has grown from $2 billion to $10 billion over the past 20 years. Currently there are about 4,000 specialty tea rooms and retail stores in the U.S. There are many demographic factors that indicate a continued economic boost for tea sales including aging baby boomers and an increased Asian population. The time is ripe for tea.

The preference here has always been for black tea, preferably iced, which makes up 85% of the U.S. market. This is why McDonalds offers Sweet Tea (water, sugar, orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea) nationwide, not just in the Southern states where the iced drink has always been popular.

Caution: What falls on the floor after roasting could end up in your 32 ounce iced tea

While this tea revolution is being led by corporate giants McDonalds, Starbucks, Pepsi (Brisk) and Coca-Cola (Honest Tea), small specialty tea shops are quietly doing more business. With increased awareness of tea comes increased demand for premium teas, because a rising tide lifts all boats (and teacups).

Some die-hard tea enthusiasts have a hard time welcoming the onslaught of new tea drinkers. Tea blogger A.C. Cargill laments there is ‘Too much emphasis on fancy tea rooms and fancy flavorings, not the real tea experience.’ A similar phenomenon happened with coffee, Starbucks was established in 1971 but the Third Wave of coffee did not take shape until 30 years later. Right now is a great opportunity for tea educators to expedite the evolution.

Shiuwen Tai, a tea shop owner and tea educator in Seattle, offers classes about how tea is grown, harvested and processed. She specializes in Taiwanese Oolong teas and leads annual trips to meet the producers. Her enthusiasm for quality tea is contagious and she shares her knowledge during tea tastings, general interest classes and lectures on advanced topics. She says people who appreciate fine coffee or fine wine will have an easier understanding when she talks about what makes a fine tea.

The East Coast is also seeing more shops devoted to fine tea. Tea server and blogger Nicole Martin reports, ‘Most in my area are brand new. Radiance Tea House in New York City is probably coming up on 8 or so years though. My favorite is definitely Tea Drunk’ (in the East Village). Both of these shops offer classes and tastings to further educate customers about fine teas.

Fresh roasted tea from Floating Leaves Tea in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, Washington

A little more tea education and it is possible some Americans may trade corporate tea’s quantity for local business’ quality, and a 1 liter cup of Sweet Tea for a 100ml gaiwan. Either way, tea is here to stay!

Samantha Joyce is a writer for Seattle Coffee Gear in Seattle, Washington and enjoys sharing her knowledge of all things coffee and tea. Currently she enjoys steeping Oriental Beauty Oolong in a gaiwan to impress her coffee-loving friends and family.

Average? Average? Do I look like an average?

October 24, 2013 / Xavier / 8 Comments

We recently had on one of the blogs hosted here at Teatra.de the beginning of a discussion regarding what is the tea community like in the USA or in the Old World (I really like using some “strange” place names from time to time).

My mind immediately jumped on the strange idea of defining an average tea drinker in the USA and in my own country and those I travel to on a regular basis.

I then gave this idea a little more thought and with my good old mathematical background, I found this was a silly idea for several reasons.

Don’t leave yet, you shouldn’t be worried, I won’t begin to focus on concepts such as mean, average, central tendency… I will leave that your former, actual or future maths teachers.

I just decided to go along with my thoughts and give you some ideas of why I came to that conclusion.

Let’s begin with some data provided by the UK Tea Council.

According to them, 165,000,000 cups of tea are drunk in the UK everyday and with 63,181,775 inhabitants, each of them should drink 2.61 cups a day.

This doesn’t seem much for a so-called tea loving country, does it?

Since 96% of all cups of tea drunk daily in the UK are brewed from tea bags, this implies that either 0.11 cup per day and per capita is made of loose leaf tea or that around 2,528,735. 63 people in the whole UK make their 2.61 cups a day with loose leaf.

I then decided to focus on my own market (so to speak) and I looked at different information sources on the French tea drinkers.

The first I found was in a market intel file on green and black teas in France made by the CBI (Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries, a Dutch Agency).

“As with wines, French consumers are looking especially for “Grand Crus”.”

“The extending tea market also involves a growing emphasis on factors such as traceability, employee working conditions on plantations and sustainability, as well as production in specific regions. French consumers want to know where their tea comes from and how it was grown and blended. Customers love to feel a connection to the source; it adds to their sense of enjoyment and pleasure and increases their understanding of their cup of tea.”

The second intel source was some information provided by the Ministry of Agriculture which basically said: tea is made in majority with bagged teas (with almost twice as much black tea being drunk as green one) and the main drinkers are in the Ile-de-France (Paris and the surroundings) or in the Western part of the country.

When you try to define a profile of an average French tea drinker, with these two different sources you get obviously nothing as they seem to be speaking of two different countries or groups of people.

Why is that? Because there is not such thing as an average tea drinker.

We all like it in a different way that might be completely opposite to our neighbour, and be far from this average picture of tea drinkers.

Does this make us an unworthy tea drinker? I don’t think so. Tea is about all of us being different and there are so many things to discover, experiment…

So next time someone tries to tell you what an average/normal/typical tea drinker is/should be, just tell him/her “Average? Average? Do I look like an average?” and then drink your favoured tea the way you want.

What could we all read?

August 26, 2013 / Xavier / 21 Comments

I don’t know how you react when looking at a tea industry magazine but I know how I feel: frustrated. Why? To answer that, one must understand what is really a magazine and what is not one.

“Magazines, periodicals, glossies, or serials are publications that are printed with ink on paper, and generally published on a regular schedule and containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, by a purchase price, by pre-paid magazine subscriptions, or all three” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magazine)

Know that we all agree on what a magazine is or isn’t, I can keep on telling you why I am bothered by these publications.

The ads do not disturb me at all, after all if I get them for free, someone has to pay for it.

What is more “annoying” is the content as sometimes:

it is free ads under disguise while they mainly speak about their products,
it is mixed quite often with coffee/spice/other drinks news,
the topics are sometimes too industry oriented and focusing on some obscure tools/techniques…

What would I want to see in such a magazine?

I don’t think tea reviews as nowadays with Internet and so many people doing that, it is not really worth it and could be easily skipped.

Articles focusing on explaining the industry in its complexity and organisation (all along the value chain) could be really interesting and could provide useful insights on how things work for the tea-lovers and also what works or doesn’t.

Another important point would be articles on countries and their specifics, be it in the way they see or produce tea.

Reports on new and actual trends would also be interesting and could foster some debate.

I know that what I describes makes this hypothetical magazine something between a generalist or for the general public magazine and a trade journal (one focusing only on the industry as its target), something that would make it difficult for it to find its target.

I know I am a bit partial here but I think it could be useful to allow all of us to better understand tea.

A lot of other things could be added and since this is just my opinion, I open the debate here on what you would like to see in a tea industry magazine but one focusing on you and me.

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