Finding a Unique Selling Point in Tea
(9) Finding a Unique Selling Point in Tea | LinkedIn
I've wanted to write about USP in tea for some time to put out there some of my experiences in how independent tea companies are trying to find the ever elusive uniqueness in the tea industry amongst non-primary producer tea brands - basically 99% of the independent UK tea industry.
But what do I mean by this? USP is what is going to make your brand/company stand out. It is what your company offers that your competitor does not. So how do companies achieve this in tea when most of the products being sold mainly come from the same finite number of sources?
The answer is with a lot of difficulty and unfortunately in some cases with misleading practices.
Coffee Roasting Comparison
The first question I always ask is "How am I adding value to my product". I like to use comparison of the coffee industry. Coffee roasters are actually physically doing something to their product - they are buying in green beans and then using their skills to roast them - so they are adding value during the roasting process. There is a story and a process and a skill involved.
Nowadays, I would say it would be almost impossible for an independent coffee brand to purchase beans roasted by a 3rd party, package them under their own brand and expect to get any traction in independent stockists or high end retailers. There would be no story or real provenance and as I have already said - no added value because they are in essence selling someone else's product. But in the tea industry, this is normal practice for most independent tea companies.
Large Range Requirement
Unlike coffee roasters where you can start a successful company with only 2 or 3 different coffees in the range, tea companies are expected to have a range covering the basics such as a breakfast blend, earl grey, chamomile, peppermint, rooibos, green tea, decaf etc and that's before you've even got the teas and blends that you want to have to distinguish yourself from the competitors. The problem is, that in order to source these items direct (to add your own sourcing story), the minimum orders for some of these are enough of each to last a start-up tea brand years worth of sales - repeat that for each tea, infusion and blend and the financial commitment is unworkable and the product is quickly eating into its shelf life.
How Tea is Sourced
I want to provide some background to how tea is sourced throughout the industry because transparency in the tea industry is currently practically non-existent. To explain tea sourcing fully, this would take a full article in its own right so here is the basics.
It is every tea trader's dream to have travelled to tea estates around the world, making direct links with the growers and taking credit for curating their unique range of products that only they have. The reality is that this is very difficult to do. Up until relatively recently, most tea growers were not interested in selling teas direct in small quantities - the number of times I have been speaking to a tea grower who's minimum order of each tea is enough to last ages if you are a new company - usually at least 1 sack of 15-20kg or in some cases a full pallet. If you need a range of 10 different teas then that's 200kg of tea.
In the the past few years, some of the growers who are making the rare and hand-made teas are starting to sell in smaller quantities of a few kg at a time - but these sources are finite and as more and more companies enter the market, they end up selling teas from the same few growers.
Flavoured Tea
I also have to mention the flavoured tea and infusion market. This is where the biggest amount of growth has been in the speciality tea industry over the past few years. Flavouring tea is not an easy thing to do and there are several significant barriers to entry - equipment, health and safety and also the cost of the flavour oils and ingredients themselves.
This is where big German (and Canadian) tea suppliers and manufacturers come in. They produce large catalogues of products including single estate and flavoured teas and blends making them a one stop shop to start your own tea brand. From these catalogues you can instantly have a range of 200 teas without having any knowledge about where the products come from or how they are made. You could argue that this is a good thing because it opens the market up to anyone who wants to start their own tea company - but only as long as there is some transparency and honesty about the sourcing route.
Adding Value to Similar Products Is Difficult
So where is the added value in tea when most independent tea companies are selling the same teas from the very similar sources?
This is the big problem about finding a USP in tea. If a company relies on one of the big German wholesalers to buy their teas (buying from a pre-designed range in a catalogue), the only value they can add is to either have a big range, present it in nice (environmentally friendly) packaging, promote their "ethical" practices (wokeness) or be the cheapest. But over the past few years with the emphasis on provenance and transparency, this is becoming a problem for a lot of tea brands and tea shops - especially like here in Edinburgh where there are five different tea companies all competing against each other. And if you take this online, the marketplace is currently in oversupply for the amount of demand.
Right now in the UK we have many start up tea brands all selling into the same space with the same products sourced from the same suppliers all desperate to set themselves aside from the nearest competitor. Some of these brands have invested quite sizeable sums of money in their branding and marketing and they are just not seeing the return they expected.
Unfortunately this is fuelling a trend of misrepresentation and/or price cutting of products as these brands are fighting it out to carve out their niche as the genuine/original or best value company. It is damaging the UK tea market as a whole and putting pressure on the relatively few tea companies who are genuinely trading with transparency and honesty.
Misrepresentation of Tea Products
Some of the tricks that are being used to misrepresent teas to the consumer are very subtle and not illegal, but are certainly unethical and very misleading. Here are some examples:
Claiming Flavoured Blends are Made In House
This is probably the biggest problem within the independent tea industry at present when a company has a range of flavoured tea blends chosen from a 3rd party manufacturer's catalogue but their website and packaging claim that "our blends have been made by us". Usually all that has happened is that the name has been changed.
Secondary Blending
This is where a tea company purchases a blend of tea or a fruit infusion from a 3rd party manufacturer and adds one or two extra ingredients, such as chocolate sprinkles or some kind of petals, and then takes credit for creating the entire blend and advertising themselves as "tea blenders". Usually the original blend already has some kind of flavour oil added to it, which accounts for most of the flavour/aroma and the added ingredients are purely visual.
Implying Origins of Ingredients
This is when a tea company is selling a product that contains ingredients that are found locally e.g Scottish flowers, English strawberries etc. but is made using generic ingredients from abroad and made by 3rd parties. By using careful wording in the description, the company can continue to do this without breaking any laws, but coupled together with carefully managed social media and product photography of the implied origins, this is very misleading to the consumer.
The biggest scandal to affect the UK tea industry at the moment is that of the Wee Tea Plantation, where there is currently an investigation into the passing off of teas as "Scottish grown" when in fact they were coming from outside of the UK. This was not just implying origin but misrepresenting the product entirely. https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17603397.storm-in-a-teacup-scottish-grower-accused-of-faking-worlds-best-tea-award/
Claiming Ethical Sourcing in About Us
How many times have you read the About Us page on a tea company's website where they claim to have ethically sourced their teas without having the ability to actually qualify this? It becomes what I recently learned is called the "yeah yeah yeah" part of a website. It is so ubiquitous that anyone who reads it thinks "yeah yeah yeah whatever" - is devalues the actual meaning of ethical trade. It becomes a generic claim without any substance and does a lot of damage to companies who have genuinely spent a lot of time and effort in ensuring that their products are actually ethically sourced.
The Big Great Taste Award Swindle
The Great Taste Awards are a brilliant way for independent food companies to have their product stand out against the multinational brands. The issue is when Great Taste Awards are applied to teas that have been sourced through the big wholesalers, because this undermines the whole premise. Imagine two separate tea companies send in the same flavoured tea from the same wholesaler but depending on which tasting panel happens to be judging, one gets 3 stars and the other gets 1 star. This has happened several times over the years and unfortunately not only undermines the tea industry but also make a bit of a mockery of the GTA system as a whole, which was originally set up to award small producers for their own recipes and products such as jams and pies.
How Do You Genuinely Stand Out?
So how do you genuinely stand out if you are in the situation of many of the start-up tea companies I have described?
The first solution is to keep your integrity and honesty because once you start misleading your customers, it's a downward spiral that is almost impossible to get out of - it could also be extremely costly in the long term.
The second is to do your research properly and to find suppliers of products that you can genuinely call your own. Tailor your range of teas to include things that are genuinely exclusive to your company and tell the story of the tea.
How can Adventures in Tea Help?
I started Adventures in Tea last year specifically to help those thinking of starting a tea company or companies already struggling to stand out.
Using our 14 years of experience and connections in the tea industry, we can help source specific ethically accredited small batch single estate teas that are more exclusive to your brand.
We are able to blend bespoke flavoured teas in very small batches that are unique to your company. Because they are blended in small batches in Edinburgh, you can then claim that the teas are exclusive to you and made in the UK and you could genuinely enter them into the Great Taste Awards. We can help to source ingredients from the UK too if this is a requirement so that the flowers and fruit used in blends is genuinely as described in the blend.
We also stock a wide range of off the shelf teas, each available in quantities of 1kg or more so that you can get your large core range such as breakfast, peppermint etc with transparent sourcing without you needing to hold too much stock.
Our website has a lot of free resource for those wanting to improve their basic knowledge of tea too.
Comments
Post a Comment