India mandates that all tea dust must be sold at auction
NETA Opposes 100% Dust Auction
Kamal Jalan, Chairman of The North Eastern Tea Association (NETA), spoke on the challenges facing the Assam tea industry and the way forward. The Association, which held its biennial general meeting in Golaghat, Assam, on March 13, has spoken against the latest government order for 100% of Tea Dust to be sold via the auction system, calling it detrimental to the industry’s survival. They also raised the issue of food safety compliance, calling for greater awareness among small tea growers, increased testing and facilities needed to conduct tests at factories, and a roadmap towards achieving 100% compliance with food safety standards. They also raised the issue of stopping tea production in winter, which is now practiced in north India. The Association has said they do not favor reducing production but instead focus on the generic promotion of tea in the domestic market, aiming for per capita consumption of 1 kilo.
Safe Tea Comes into Focus
Indian tea is seeing a renewed and determined march towards food safety. After coming under constant flak, 2024 opened with the Food Safety Standards Association of India, calling for more compliance and partnering with the tea board to see how this can be effected. It’s good to see it in action. Last week, the FSSAI led a training session in the Nilgiris on safe and hygienic tea production practices for small tea growers. In North Bengal, the domestic certification body Trustea partnered with the association of small tea growers for training on pest control, soil health management, and pesticide use.
India Sends Delegates to Iran
Iran, once a big buyer of Indian tea, has ceased to import the same volumes as before. The Mint reported that tea shipments to Iran have dropped from 54.5 mn kilos in 2019 to 5.2 mn between January and November 2023. Iran is still considered an important export market; a trade delegation is planned to dialogue with Iranian authorities. Shipping disruptions and payment challenges aside, Iran had an internal crisis in November 2023 when tea importer Debsh Tea Company was embroiled in a $3.4 billion embezzlement scandal. India’s tea exports to the UAE dropped 25% from 2022 to 2023.
Kattabettu INDCO Tea Factory, established in 1976, was recently refurbished.
ITA & Goodricke Group Announce Appointments
The Goodricke Group has appointed Arun Narain Singh as the Managing Director and CEO, effective March 6, 2024. This appointment follows the resignation of Atul Asthana last month. Mr Singh has held this position and most recently has been Founder Trustee of Tea Vision, an industry think tank building a common platform for multiple stakeholders in the tea industry and to be the industry’s voice.
The National Committee of the Indian Tea Association (ITA), meeting on March 12, announced the appointment of Hemant Bangur of Shri Vasupradha Plantations as Chairman, Suneel Singh Sikand, CEO of Rossell Tea, as Vice Chairman, and Atul Rastogi, Director of Luxmi Tea, as Additional Vice Chairman of the Association. Founded in 1881, the Indian Tea Association, headquartered in Kolkata, is India’s oldest organization of tea producers.
INDCO in the Nilgiris Gets a Tourism Boost
Tea tourism comes into focus in the south as well. In the Nilgiris, INDCOServe tea cooperative is set to receive Rs 7.4 crore (approx USD 900,000) to convert its Kattabettu tea factory into a tea tourism hub under the Tamil Nadu Innovation Initiatives plan. The funds will be used to create a living tea museum that will house various tea plants and allow visitors to see how tea is made and taste different teas. Both tea and tourism are essential to the economy of the Nilgiris, and this move is seen as a boost to that. INDCOServe is the largest tea cooperative in the country, with 30,000 small farmer members and 16 factories in the Nilgiris.
Tea trade associations, research institutes, tea boards, tea brands, and the United Nations Intergovernmental Group on Tea (IGG/Tea) are organizing to collectively promote #TeaPower for International Tea Day, May 21. The online and event-based marketing program heralds the benefits of including tea in every high-energy fitness regimen, from organized sports and cycling to nature walks and solo ascents. Messaging targets youth, but the findings on dietary benefits and hydration are science-backed and essential to healthy living.
Shabnam Weber is president of the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada and co-chair of the United Nations IGG Working Group on Tea & Health, which developed the program. She discusses why #TeaPower is “the perfect pitch for younger generations looking to increase their performance and energy levels while staying healthy.”
Shabnam Weber, President of the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada
A Youth-Focused Health and Fitness Campaign to Boost Consumption
By Dan Bolton
Shabnam Weber worked for 18 years in tea retail as president and CEO of Toronto-based Tea Emporium. She is also an accomplished tea educator, establishing the Academy of Tea in 2016 and developing the THAC Tea Sommelier program curriculum. Shabnam graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honors degree in Political Science and a post-graduate diploma in Psychology. She was named president of Canada’s Tea and Herbal Association in 2018.
In January, Shabnam traveled to Guwahati, Assam, as one of 44 country delegates at the recently concluded 25th Session of the United Nations FAO Intergovernmental Group on Tea (IGG Tea). During the past two years, as co-chair of the Working Group on Tea and Health, she tirelessly promoted the merits of a unified global campaign to make the benefits of drinking tea relevant to younger generations. She says that #TeaPower will generate a global buzz around tea and its role in improved fitness. “There is extensive evidence supporting tea benefits in sports and fitness performance and optimal hydration,” she explains. “These scientific findings provide the framework for a youth-focused campaign to encourage increased tea consumption.”
We need to remember that our competition is not ourselves. That’s a message for everybody in this industry: we are not the competition; the competition is other beverages. The only way for us to break through that noise is to work together.
Dan Bolton: I greatly admire your work as an ambassador and architect in tea marketing and an articulate tea health and wellness spokesperson. Thank you for taking the time to brief our readers on this initiative.
Shabnam Weber: It’s always a pleasure chatting with you. And you know, I also have to say a big thank you for your work within the industry, which is important.
Dan: Will you tell listeners how #TeaPower came about?
Shabnam: Tea Power came out of this continued conversation that we were having at FAO IGG on Tea about our desire to have a global generic promotion.
It’s a lofty endeavor and nice to say, but what do you focus on? How do you do it?
We decided that the focus should be tea and health. So, a couple of years ago, a new working group was formed, the working group on tea and health. As a group, we got together and had several meetings discussing what kind of promotion we wanted to do and deciding who our target should be.
Throwing a message out targeted at everybody is just too much and lacks focus – especially when you consider that the marketing and promotion world that we live in now is no longer print, television, and radio. It’s digital, and digital adopts and adapts. It’s a very, very noisy environment, which means that you have to be very targeted. So, the group decided that the focus should be on youth.
“Digital adopts and adapts. It’s a very, very noisy environment, which means that you have to be very targeted. So, the group decided that the focus should be on youth.”
– Shabnam Weber
Once that was decided, it was very clear to us that we had to reposition the tea and health messaging the industry has focused on, such as cardiovascular health, bone health, and diabetes.
These are all important and critical aspects of tea and its promotion. But they’re not what the youth are interested in because, thank goodness, they’re not concerned about cardiovascular health, diabetes, osteoporosis, etcetera, etcetera.
So, we made a list of what interests them, and sport and fitness were high on that list, as was beauty, hydration, and mental health.
We then needed to look at what scientific data met the requirements we had set for ourselves as a group, identifying the highest scientific standards that needed to be met.
The scientific papers we found that met all the requirements we had set, were sport and fitness, hydration, and mental health.
That’s a fast-forward version of what took us two years to put together.
Dan: So, what’s the next step?
Shabnam: What the working group is doing now is putting together the campaign, and that means putting together all the scientific evidence. Our regulators require scientific evidence if we’re going to make promotional claims. Then, we’re designing images, visual collateral, ideas, suggestions, hashtags, for everyone to share. This package will be available to all. I can’t stress enough the importance of hashtags and a unified message. We are in this very, very noisy world of social media and that is what will unite this campaign. The way that I’m going to promote tea power is going to be different than, let’s say, Sri Lanka might, or India might, or China might, or Kenya might because it needs to be focused on individual markets and what works in each of our respective markets.
What connects the whole conversation are hashtags. If we all share the same hashtag, we’re all sending out the same message. I reminded the group when we met in India just a few weeks ago that we, as an industry, managed to trend number one on Twitter in 2021. And we managed to do that because we all agreed to use the hashtag tea on International Tea Day.
That was at a time when Trump was president and dominating Twitter. The Syrian war was going on at the same time; yet we managed to break through that noise. And for a short time, we were trending number one on Twitter. It’s a really, really big deal for a food product without controversy to trend through the noise of social media.
I’m often asked why that occurred only in 2021. Unfortunately, the following year’s International Tea Day fell on a weekend, so nobody was celebrating simultaneously. 2024 is the perfect opportunity to get that going again.
Dan: So, we should all synchronize our social posts for T-Day, Tuesday, May 21.
Shabnam: Yes
Young people enjoying tea enjoy life-long, scientifically proven health benefits.
Dan: Young people benefit most from tea health and fitness education. Daily tea consumption delivers on the promise of health and longevity. They know that eating plant-based food is a lifetime habit. It should be the same for tea. Society teaches people to put aside a little money for retirement in their 20s and buy life insurance when premiums are low. The working group has devised a great start to explain the benefits of healthy hydration, but this work is ongoing – in fact, it’s never-ending. Who will update the research and maintain momentum?
Shabnam: You’re absolutely right. To answer your question, one of the things that we did as a group was to agree on two key pillars within the IGG: sustainability and advocacy. Canada and Sri Lanka co-chair the advocacy group and the UK and Kenya co-chair sustainability.
The advocacy group is going to carry this forward.
Shabnam, will you rephrase the following graph?
Sport and fitness is the first campaign we’re rolling out. The purpose of the Advocacy Pillar is to continue campaigns like this and find other messages that we can unite in within the industry.
This is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of speaking with one voice. Our messaging might be slightly different, depending on markets, but to pick up on what you said earlier about youth and the power of lifelong habits, I think everyone needs to understand how important and critical this is to the industry.
Trying to change people’s habits later in life is hard. Children form most of their habits by the age of nine. That’s crazy. We did a study, a questionnaire a couple of years ago, asking young people in Canada between the ages of 18 and 24 when they started their tea-drinking habits. And it was in their homes before the age of nine. A psychological study at Stanford University found that if you haven’t tried sushi by age 39, there is a 95% chance you never will. As we age, we are less open to “novelty.”
Dan: The point is that until you have experienced sushi, it’s just a plate of raw fish, right?
Shabnam: Exactly.
If you haven’t experienced something, you’re less likely to try new things the older you get.
We really need to start learning and thinking about how we translate this for the consumer, “Joe Public.” They want to know, what does it mean for me? Translating it into something like sport and fitness and hydration and mental health, which are such big topics right now, is really important because we need to start living in the real world.
If we want to grow this industry, we must start thinking about the real world and how it talks, behaves, and is influenced. Making that connection is what we’re planning to do – no, not planning to do. We’re going to do it, and we’re going to kick it off for this International Tea Day.
That’s Tuesday, May 21
Dan: German grocery stores sell decaffeinated baby tea. It’s given to two-year-olds and three-year-olds, and they love it. Tea tastes good, right? If you introduce children to something good for them, they will develop a taste for it.
In the same way, it’s absolutely on point to explain the importance of hydration to young people. That’s a trending topic right now. Cure Hydration recently introduced Cure Kids, an electrolyte drink blending coconut water, pink Himalayan salt, and fruit juice powders.
Manufacturers mixing synthetically produced vitamins and minerals into bottled water blended with powdered juice concentrate to “cure” kids is the craziness that distracts the world from the benefits of natural plant-based beverages. We could undoubtedly make tea more convenient and appealing. Will you share your thoughts on promoting tea as the healthiest of health beverages?
Kids Electrolyte Drink Mix
Shabnam: Talking about vitamin water, at the last North American tea conference, there was a presentation on the fastest-growing beverage trend, which is water that’s been fortified. And I have to bang my head against the wall when I hear things like that because we are the original fortified water, we are the original vitamin water.
You know, I say this all the time: we have a product that comes out of the ground. It contains essential vitamins, it is full of minerals, it is full of stories, it is full of legends, and it is full of marketing opportunities; it’s got everything; we have to tell the story.
So, how do we tell that story? How do we take that product and as I said earlier, make it relevant in the real world? Well, the real world, as you just said, wants convenience. So, you know, if we want sport and fitness and hydration, and you know you’re going out for your marathon or half, whatever it is that you’re doing for sport and fitness, you’ll want something that has no sugar. You want something natural, no artificial anything. So why aren’t we taking pure tea? Why can’t we take tea that has been infused with water and bottle it? That’s the end of the story. But then, rather than bottle it as an ordinary iced tea, let’s market it as an energy drink, without any of the negatives of an energy drink, because the energy is natural. We’re not talking about moderate caffeination, zero sugar, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, et cetera, et cetera. We sometimes get pigeonholed by what we know and how we always do things, right? How do you get somebody to buy a bottle of iced tea for sport and fitness? Well, how about you change the label on it and don’t call it iced tea? Call it a sport and fitness enhancer, for example.
Dan: That’s a creative solution. To me, it’s an opening for green. In the 1990s, green tea accounted for about 3% of tea imports in the US. Researchers published compelling evidence during that decade that green tea was good for you. Sales shot up, and green tea imports reached almost 20% of overall tea. They’ve fallen to around 14%. The single biggest complaint is that it fails to deliver on the promise of good health; what holds back green tea is the hassle of making it and the limited foods that can be paired. When you change the format to powder, matcha green tea has excellent culinary appeal, from salads to desserts, and is an energy boost in smoothies. Can we use sports celebrity endorsements to refresh the image of green tea?
Shabnam: Wouldn’t it be amazing to have an NFL team that pours tea over the coach? Instead of the bucket of Gatorade. Honestly, the onus is on us to figure out how to not just re-market it, not by changing the name of tea but by restating its benefits. When I have this conversation with a handful of brands, I guarantee you that the answer will be, well, we’ve already done it; we’ve got iced tea, so you know, “let’s just push that out.”
That’s not enough. I don’t think it’s enough. I think there needs to be marketing around it to make that connection that this is an iced tea, but it’s your sports and fitness drink.
Dan: Consider a campaign around the marketing concept of “healthy hydration.” Hydration speaks to active athletes who ride bicycles, pump iron, and play football. Healthy hydration also rings a bell for neighborhood walkers, joggers, weekend baseball players, and yoga enthusiasts. You don’t have to put TEA in big letters on the label. Healthy Hydration can stand alone on the shelf, separate from Gatorade and Vitamin Water. In that category, green will stand out as seasonal and origin-specific with the taste and sweetness of the first flush.
#TeaPower campaign report by UN FAO IGG/Tea
Dan: How does the launch look at this point?
Shabnam: Well, the beauty of this campaign is that it is whatever you want to make of it.
I mean, at the end of the day, having everybody chip in for one global campaign wasn’t realistic, right?
One of the important elements when we considered how we wanted to roll this out was that we also needed to live in the real world and say, okay, how is this realistically going to happen? That means putting together this package that we’ll be delivering to all the members of the IGG. Then, every member will roll it out however they want to.
So, if, for example, somebody finds an athlete, as you’ve suggested, or a celebrity to endorse the campaign, then great.
If you want to do something as a live event, then that would be great. If it’s going to be purely social media, that’s fine as long as we’re maintaining some of the elements in terms of the messaging, sport, fitness, hydration, and then the added hashtags. That’s what’s going to make the connection for us. So, I think, as I said, the beauty of it will be to see how everybody translates this and how it’s going to roll out on the one hand differently, but then, at the same time, unified for this year’s International Tea Day.
Shabnam: We need to remember that our competition is not ourselves. That’s an essential message for everybody in this industry: we are not the competition; the competition is other beverages.
The only way for us to break through that noise is to work together. When we have these conversations at the IGG, it’s really good for all of us to work together. And the power we have working together is greater than we sometimes understand.
Share this post Episode 158 | TeaPower is “the perfect pitch for younger generations looking to increase their performance and energy levels while staying healthy,” says Shabnam Weber, President of the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada and co-chair of the United Nations IGG Working Group on Tea & Health that developed the program. | 9 March 2024
Slack sails signaled trouble for sailors plying the trade routes of yore. The Intertropical Convergence Zone, known by sailors as the doldrums, describes a monotonous, windless passage. This is a helpful metaphor describing the past 25 years of tea exports. Like the converging trade winds, the impact shifts with the seasons and location, but the overall drag on productivity, resources, and profits is global.
The Tea Association of India warns these times signal a return to the “dark phase.”
Ajay Jalan, president of the Tea Association of India (TAI), cited stagnant prices, oversupply, a widening gap between demand and supply, and a “race to the bottom” for cheaper teas.
Speaking to delegates at the association’s annual meeting, he was quoted in The Hindu, saying, “The economic strides made by our nation are indeed commendable, yet the tea industry is currently experiencing challenges reminiscent of the dark phase two decades ago.” Twenty-two years ago, India’s tea industry experienced a severe downturn until 2007 (when a global recession extended the pain).
India is not alone. China’s tea export value declined by 16% to $1.74 billion in 2023 (down by $343 million), falling below $2 billion. China’s export value fell by 9.6% in 2022. Export volume remains low in Sri Lanka, but tea value rose to $1.3 billion in 2023. After exports fell to $940 million in 2022, Kenya was the only top five tea producers to show gains in volume and value. Export earnings rose 31% to a record $1.24 billion in 2023. Export volume grew by 72.5 million kilos year-over-year to 523 million kilos.
Record volume, but the price per kilo for auctioned tea averages hovered around $2.25 per kilo — well below 2022 when prices peaked at $2.74 per kilo.
World Tea Exports
World Tea Production
“Global sales of exported tea from all countries totaled $7.87 billion in 2022, up by a flatlining 0.2% since 2018, when worldwide tea exports were worth $7.86 billion,” according to analyst Daniel Workman at World’s Top Exports. “Year over year, the value of worldwide tea exports shrank by an average -8.8% compared to $8.63 billion in 2021. Only China, Sri Lanka, and Kenya generate more than $1 billion in dollar value, accounting for 60% of global export value.
Demand is steady, but prices are stagnant, preventing producers from keeping pace with rising labor and input costs. Mass market retailers continue to pressure brands, which pressures margins, which averaged only 5% in India last year and have fallen 150 basis points since 2022, according to Crisil Ratings.
The UN FAO’s Intergovernmental Group on Tea (IGG/Tea), at its 25th Session in January, released a comprehensive analysis everyone in the industry should read.
The report states, “International tea prices, as measured by the FAO Tea Composite price, a weighted average price index for black tea, including crush, tear, curl (CTC) and Orthodox teas, remained firm over the last decade.
In this instance, “remaining firm” means losing ground.
The report summarizes the key takeaway: “Over the last decade, world tea intake increased annually by 3.3%, reflecting strong growth in producing countries that have more than offset declines in traditional importing markets.”
The good news is that FAO projects long-term demand for tea is rising. Global intake has increased by 3.3% annually for the last decade. Year-over-year consumption expanded by 2% in 2022.
The bad?
After increasing by 14.5% in 2022, tea prices fell by 9.2% in 2023, as availabilities expanded while demand slowed, putting downward pressure on prices.
FAO writes, “Diversification and value addition are vital to boosting the sector’s performance, as consumer behavior is evolving towards specialty and high-quality tea products.”
Eliminate the surplus, destroy waste leaves, and pivot to quality.
The race to the bottom is exacting much too high a price
Episode 158 | Sailing Through the Tea Doldrums | India Budgets a Big Increase for its Tea Industry | Crude Tea Production in Japan Declined in 2023 | Episode 158
I am a niche content creator specializing in fostering genuine connections globally through informative, educational, and captivating conversations centered around the world of tea. | Host | Tea Biz Blog | Podcast
Bihar, a state that borders Bengal, has been designated as a non-traditional tea area since 1998 and has just been awarded a trademark by the Indian government. The trademark provides for better protection for goods and services.
Bihar today has 56,000 hectares – mainly in the Kishanganj district – in tea cultivation and produces over 45,000 metric tons of raw tea leaves annually. In 2020, tea was identified as a focus area under the Bihar Agri Investment Policy (2020). Under the Bihar Tea Development Scheme (2023), tea producers are eligible for a 50-90% subsidy on tea cultivation. The state is keen to expand the area under tea farming. Leading the tea movement here is Doke Tea by Rajiv Lochan, who has been producing artisanal tea for the last decade.
Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates Unwittingly Promotes Chai
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was in India last week and introduced his trip with a video on chai! Now famous as “One Chai Please,” it shows Gates walking up to a chaiwala and commenting that innovation abounds here, even in how chai is made. This video on Gates’ Instagram handle has garnered 7.6 million likes, besides making the chaiwala, Sunil Patel, who goes by the name Dolly Chaiwala, famous overnight.
Muskan Khanna, of the boutique Tea Studio in the Nilgiris, won the patent for her tea, Nilgiri Bamboo, described as a green tea made using only the internode between the terminal bud and the first leaf of a tea shoot. The patent comes after five years of work. Khanna runs The Tea Studio in the Nilgiris as a women-only company producing bespoke specialty tea. In a social media post, Muskan’s father, tea veteran Indi Khanna, said that this patent is second in tea making, following the patent for the Rotorvane in the 1960s granted to the TRI.
