Tetley makes tea bars, makes tea more trendy

Tetley is setting up a national chain of tea bars called Gaffer's following the successful trial of the first branch in Manchester's Royal Exchange.

It is the third tea merchant to set up this kind of outlet in the last year. Whittard opened a London tea bar last year, while Lipton and PG Tips producer Unilever opened the Cha bar in Brighton in May and will open another this month in Bristol.

A recent Datamonitor report found tea had lost some of its market share to soft drinks and coffee. It concluded that tea's more traditional image needed a makeover in order to rival the 355 fashionable coffee bars in the UK (Caterer, 29 July, page 14).

Gaffer's is themed around the Tetley tea folk - the mainstream Tetley tea bag is the company's best seller - but group commercial director John Nicholas said Gaffer's offers a more "modern and fun" setting than the traditional "frilly table cloth".

Passion for Food, which runs Unilever's Cha tea bar in Brighton, has been more radical in trying to make tea as trendy as coffee. Its bestseller is not a traditional brew but a frappé tea with fruit, yoghurt and ice. Also doing well is spiced cha, a cappuccino-style tea with hot steamed milk spiked with pepper or cardamom or cloves.

Alongside nearly 30 loose-leaf single-estate teas, Cha also sells Chinese green tea, decaffeinated and flavoured varieties.

by Angela Frewin