STiR coffee and tea magazine

22 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 4, 2018 (August / September) Tea Report: Peter Keen CHINA China Needs Tea Brand China's tea production and markets earn labels of "strongest", "largest", and "growing" in every area but one. It does not have any world class brand. This recent statement was made by Tang Ke, a director in the Ministry of Agriculture at the 2nd China International Tea Expo. It's well supported by expert and industry opinion and data. Almost any published discussion of China tea brands centers on the dominant player: Lipton, that takes cheap China leaf and packages it in tea bags, commanding a higher price in world markets than comparable China mass market teas. Reports from the tea expo state that the profit margins of 10,000 Chinese tea enterprises are uniformly lower than Lipton's. China has been the world's largest tea producer for well over a decade. In 2017, it overtook Kenya as the largest exporter. (This mainly reflected the widespread Kenya drought.) Exports were 355,000 metric tons, out of a total output of 2.6 million tons. The lack of brand power reduces profitability in expert markets, where China's specialty teas stand out but are elite names – Mao Feng, Wuyi oolong, Dragonwell, etc. – that rarely translate to brands. In the domestic market, this impedes the growth of customer relationships and market positioning. A study of 10,000 consum- ers in 10 Chinese cities found that only 11% bought tea from the same company. There are many factors that help explain the branding gap: the fragmenta- tion, localization, and specialization among 70,000 tea producers stand out. A 2016 report on Lipton's success aptly summarizes the market as "jumbled" and "confusing." Neither helps in building customer communication and trust. There are many lists of top 10 tea brands, with little systematic base or objective measures. They are consistent, however in grouping the following brands as leaders: Twining, Celestial Seasonings, Tazo, Harney and Sons, Dilmah, Lipton, Bigelow, Yorkshire, and Tetley. What's most intriguing is that in many of the reviews, the brand image shows a China green tea. By contrast, in answer to a query "What are some good tea brands from China", Quora, a well-established community and expert forum, provides just four "try this one" names and adds "the other brands are just not famous enough even for a common Chinese person to know." The lack of brands is an opportu- nity. It seems most likely that the leaders will build on China's rapidly growing e-commerce platforms to establish identity. milligrams of tea solids, consumed within a period of 90 minutes and delivering at least 90 mg of caffeine and 36 mg of l-theanine (the amino acid commonly found in tea leaves.) The new vocabulary will replace the two dominant phrases in the research literature: "green tea may…." and "more research is needed." The Unilever application builds on research on caffeine and adenosine that dates to 2010. What makes it "new" is that "may" is replaced by "does" and "more research" by "scientifically proven." That caffeine helps you concentrate isn't exactly a lightning flash of insight. "But we know that." "Yes, but now we know exactly how it works, why and within what conditions." The claims – and often folklore – of tea curing disease or guaranteeing weight loss will increasingly be tested at the biogenetic level and at some stage we will see the medical certification that today no tea has earned. EFSA is a decentralized agency within the EU that provides scientific recom- mendations and advice to policy makers on risks associated with the food chain. INDIA Wage Hike Quiets Assam The government of Assam awarded an interim pay raise of $0.45 per day through 2019 as negotiations continue over wage parity in the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Tea workers maintain that growers must implement the Minimum Wage Act, which establishes a national baseline for agriculture wages. Growers favor independent negotiations on three-year intervals which has been the practice since 1977. A working committee of planters, workers, and government officials continues to seek a resolution. The Assam raise, which is retroactive to March 1, 2018, brings daily wages to $2.43 in the Brahmaputra River Valley and $2.11 per day in the Barak Valley. Workers will also for the first time be covered by government insurance in case of permanent disability or death. Coverage applies to 800,000 workers with bank accounts and will expand as others qualify. Under the program the government transfers an annual premium to personal accounts where it is debited. In a related development McLeod Russel, the largest tea plantation EU Unilever's Successful Health Claim Unilever's success in its health claim application to European Food and Safety Authority regulators (EFSA) indicates the scientific progress of tea-health links. Research studies are now able to show specific molecular cause-effect relation- ships instead of correlations that are suggestive but do not meet standards of scientific evidence. The Unilever claim is that "owing to its caffeine content, black tea improves attention." It laid out how this works. The molecular structure of caffeine is like adenosine, a central nervous systems neuromodulator. When adenosine binds to its molecular receptors, this slows neural activity in the brain's striatum, a cluster of neurons in the forebrain. The striatum coordi- nates many aspects of cognition. Caffeine binds to the same receptors, blocking the binding of adenosine and thus its lessening of alertness. It also affects dopaminergic excitative neu- rotransmitter pathways that manage attention. Yes, the language is obscure and specialized, but it is at the core of tea biogenetics. The methods behind the language are supported by host – real people – studies. These controlled for conditions of use, such as time of the tea serving, amount and cumulative intake. An EFSA working group panel of experts laid out conditions of use questions to complement the Unilever "hard" science. This fine-tuning estab- lished that the health claim was substan- tiated by an accumulation of 1,040

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