Brew heaven
Tea is still the nation's favourite drink - but only at home. So what's going wrong? Amanda Marcus finds out.
Seven out of 10 people in the UK will have at least one cup of tea today - but not outside their home. Why? Because they don't trust caterers to make a decent cuppa. Tea is a market opportunity just waiting to be exploited, and caterers should wake up to that fact fast. That's the blunt message from head of the Tea Council, Bill Gorman.
Tea consumption in volume terms has been declining slowly for some years and is now down by about 10% compared with 25 years ago. It has suffered considerably from the inroads made on the youth market by soft drinks, and tea suppliers know they have a fight on their hands to get younger customers interested. But still, argues Gorman, caterers are badly mistaken if they think tea is a dead market.
On the contrary, the UK consumes 160 million cups per day of tea, and tea still outsells coffee by two to one in total volume terms. But the difference between home and away-from-home numbers says it all: some 86% of all tea drunk in the UK is consumed at home, only 14% away from home.
"Food service outlets are missing an enormous opportunity," says Gorman. "They can buy a decent tea bag for 1.5p and charge £1.20 a cup, but they don't do it. There's a lot of serious rubbish out there as well as the good stuff, and the temptation has been to save a few pence and source cheap tea. But decent tea is not expensive. It just needs to be properly prepared and marketed. Caterers wouldn't treat their sandwiches the way they do tea."
Mike Lawless, senior brand manager for Tetley GB, agrees. "People's purchasing preferences do not reflect their drinking patterns at home," he says.
But things are improving, albeit slowly. Service stations, for example, are increasingly looking at branded and better teas and introducing better cutlery, teapots, etc - as are contract caterers. "There's still a place for the traditional tea stand in our sites," says John Brown, of contract caterer Just Deli, "but speciality products and premium teas can command a higher price, and I think they could really take off."
Non-traditional growth
Suppliers, too, are having to search for new ways to drive the market forward. The home market for non-traditional teas has shown strong growth over the past year, with decaffeinated teas worth £17.9m (up 11%), organic teas at £5m (up a sharp 48%) and green teas worth £5m (up 28%). While these consumer growth rates are impressive, the away-from-home market remains relatively niche and small, but it is growing.
Much of the success of green tea is associated with health benefits, and these are now being promoted by black-tea suppliers, too. Tetley, for example, is currently working on a promotion with the British Heart Foundation. The basic message is that drinking tea can be good for your heart.
Unlike the coffee market, where the UK has adopted many of the trends seen across the Atlantic, the tea markets on either side of the pond are quite different. According to Tetley, the vast majority of tea sold in the USA is iced tea and iced tea derivatives, but here the cold tea market is undeveloped.
Tea suppliers need to find another way of reaching the youth market. Part of the problem is tea's image of being a drink more associated with an older age group and more working-class. Still, some sectors are growing and need to be capitalised on: women in the 25-30 age band, for example, like the idea of (black) tea as calorie-free, relaxing and healthy, in Gorman's opinion. The youth market is a bigger problem, he admits, with advertisers spending seven times more on advertising soft drinks than is spent on tea.
Marketing ideas
Twinings Foodservice has published a Guide to Serving a Contemporary Beverage Menu booklet to help caterers decide what to put on their beverage menu to fulfil consumer expectation and keep up to date with recent trends. As well as information on drinks trends and detailing the Twinings product range, the guide covers facts about how tea is produced, its history, health benefits, presentation ideas and point-of-sale and merchandising material. (Call Twinings on 01264 348681 to request a copy.)
One of the trendier offerings to bring back the youth could well be the hot-can concept, which Nestlé already offers for coffee, whereby a ring on the bottom of the can injects a blast of heat. "This could open up a whole new sector," says Tetley's Lawless. "It's very big in Japan, where vending is a huge business. There are opportunities here which could be massive - hot cans for boarding a train with, or going into a football match, and so on."
Another long-term opportunity is to promote speciality and single-estate teas, as the coffee market is doing. Alan Dean, who owns the Tea & Coffee Shop in Norwich, is trying to do just that. His factory manufactures tea bags and sells to wholesalers and to the tearoom. But, in his view, speciality tea shops will remain a niche market. In his own, coffee sales are still double those of tea.
Interesting flavours
"The explosion in coffee shops is a result of the introduction of espresso machines. Suddenly it was possible to have an exotic coffee drink like a cappuccino which people couldn't make at home, whereas they can make tea. Tea is a far more interesting drink than coffee in terms of tastes and flavours, but tea shops will only expand if someone with lots of money pushes them on to the high street," says Dean.
In Dean's tearoom only about 10% of all tea drunk is speciality, but the proportion is rising. The noticeable success story is green tea, where sales have risen sharply over the past few years, both in the shop and the caf‚.
Suppliers have not been slow to spot the niche markets. Tazo, for example, offers a range of black, green and herbal teas with names like Om, Envy and Zen, Passion, Calm and Wild Sweet Orange (distributed by DaVinci Fine Foods in the UK). Each one has a claimed healing or beneficial quality unique to that blend. Twinings Foodservice is now introducing an enveloped version of its Lotus Green Tea especially for its food service range this month.
Cafédirect launched three organic teas in September, Teadirect Organic Green Tea with Lemongrass, Teadirect Organic Green Tea with Cinnamon, and Teadirect Organic Earl Grey. Sylvie Condette, strategic development manager, says the launches are capitalising on the company's success with Teadirect - a black tea range, which is the fastest growing product in its sector. Sales of organic tea reached £1.76m in 2001, up 23% compared with 2000, according to a report by Taylor Nelson Sofres.
Condette says: "There are two sections in the tea market where we want to be in 2002: speciality teas, as they are growing 9% year-on-year; and green teas, which are trebling year-on-year."
Twinings also launched an Organic Traditional English tea earlier this year as an enveloped and tagged tea bag. And Typhoo introduced the Extra Fresh Speciality teas "designed to attract new, younger and more affluent customers".
While the specialist tea shop may remain a niche business, it's clear that tea has a lot of room for growth in the away-from-home market - but the consumer will take some persuading. As coffee bars reach saturation point in some areas, they will be looking to introduce more choice, including tea. "My local coffee bar has just moved away from high stools and installed comfy sofas," observes Gorman. "That's a perfect environment for serving tea."
Speciality teas - what's what
Assam: strong, deep-coloured teas from north India.
Darjeeling: light and delicate teas from the Indian slopes of the Himalayas
Ceylon: produces a large variety of strong, highly flavoured teas.
East Africa: Kenya, Rwanda, etc, produce teas that are full-bodied and bright with a good copper colour. Most goes into tea bags.
China: produces a great variety of tea. The best-known are the Keemuns - light and delicate - and the wood-smoked Lapsang Souchongs.
Blends: the best-known are English Breakfast, a full-strength blend, and Earl Grey, a mixture of Keemun and Darjeeling scented with bergamot.
Green teas: mainly from China and Japan. Very delicate and best made with water well off the boil.
Fruit teas: black tea which is artificially flavoured with fruit such as mango, lemon, etc.
Herbal "teas": normally in tea-bag form, these are strictly herbal mixtures and do not contain any real black tea.
Source: The Tea & Coffee Shop, Norwich
All you need to know about tea
The Tea Council has been in operation for 35 years, offering advice and information on all aspects of tea, from general guidance to health and political issues. For further details visit the Web site at www.tea.co.uk or e-mail tea@teacouncil.co.uk. Tel: 020 7371 7787.
Tetley Tea launched a new Web site in August to help caterers get the most from their tea service (www.teaexperts.co.uk).
Single-garden teas in a nutshell
The land on which tea is grown is normally referred to as a tea garden. These are not gardens in the traditional sense but generally large estates of many hundreds or thousands of acres. Most of the world's tea ends up in blends, but some gardens produce tea of a sufficiently distinguished quality to be drunk on its own - single-garden teas. The top-quality tea gardens of India, Sri Lanka and some other countries have individual names.
Today most of the world's teas (but not China ones) use a standard lettering system to describe the leaf quality: P = pekoe (leaf), B = broken; O = orange; F = flowery (or fannings); G = golden; T = tippy. Hence BOP = broken orange pekoe.
China tea is different. It is not usually grown on large estates, as in India, but rather on lots of smallholdings, then sent to the nearest central factory, where it is graded and sorted. So, for example, while China Keemun tea is just that - Keemun leaf with nothing added - it is almost certainly a mixture of teas from several different growers. Various grades of China teas are often given the names of flowers or birds to denote the quality of the leaf.
