STiR coffee and tea magazine

22 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 6, 2019 (December / January 2020) Tea Report: Peter Keen Global Green Tea Projections Sales growth of green tea remains robust globally at an estimated compounded rate of 5.8% through 2025, according to Reportlinker. "Green tea bags, one of the seg- ments analyzed and sized in this study displays the potential to grow at over 6.3% to $9.2 billion by 2025," according to the Global Green Tea Industry report. US growth is projected at 4.9%. Germany is the largest European green tea market, adding $287 million during the next five years while the rest of Europe adds $247 million in sales. Japan will reach a market size of $480 million China, the world's largest green tea producer, is expected to add $2.2 billion in sales "exhibiting the potential to grow at 8.5% over the next couple of years," according to the report. Lear more: reportlinker.com Tea on planes: Safe or Sorry? Every day around three million airline passengers in the skies over the US eat and drink on flights. Many are regular tea and coffee drinkers who'd welcome a cup of their choice. But offered one, they are likely to reply with a firm "No thank you" or a less polite "No way." A long-established truism in air travel is that the water used to make tea is dangerous. This dates to a still widely cited EPA study in 2004 that concluded that disease-causing pathogens "could be" contaminating the water of 15% of airlines: bacteria, salmonella, e-coli, and viruses. A Hunter College, New York City, report published at the end of 2018 added support for this. It included a questionnaire on water sanitation sent to 10 US airlines and one Canadian. Only a few responded. The resulting report highlighted lack of frequency and thoroughness of cleaning, poor quality water handling in many international airports' trucks and storage, and limited regulatory oversight. The EPA/FDA/FAA jointly administered Airline Water Safety Act, for instance, requires disinfection and flushing of pipes and tanks just 1-4 times a year. The Hunter Study listed the practices of several airlines, implying that they were not fully adequate in addressing the scale of the problems. Delta disinfects its tanks four times a year and cleans taps and surfaces between each flight. Delta staff attend "drinking water service training sessions" annually. American Airlines routinely disinfects water tanks, trucks, and catering carts. Many articles list the opinions of airline cabin crews. These are impossible to evaluate in that they are selective, not random, and opinions based on experi- ence and personal views. They seem very much an even split between "It's safe" and "You'll be sorry." Some flight attendants are very firm that they and most of their colleagues entirely avoid drinking tea and coffee in flight. Others report no problems in their often-long experience and view the issue as just one of the widespread compromises inherent in air travel along with air, food, passenger coughs and colds, etc. All in all, the evidence is blurred. One point that should carry weight is that there does not seem be to be even one documented instance of passenger or crew illness from drinking tea. The safe-sorry issue seems likely to merit more rigorous research and improvement in practice. More and more airlines are adding gourmet afternoon teas to their offerings as well as upgrading their breakfasts. Examples are Virgin Atlanta, FinnAir, Singapore Airlines, Air France, and TAP. Several of these involve partnerships with top of the line tea providers, such as TWG. Obviously, these demand the highest level of water quality and safety. In addition, there's a large under- served market segment of passengers who don't want to load up on alcohol, dislike sodas and are motivated in their drink choices by wellness, functional specialty, and flavor. If they believe, correctly or incor- rectly, that airline water is not safe, then they will reject an otherwise pleasing addition to their flight experience and the airline miss out on adding to and upgrading their passenger service. This is a market waiting to be filled. Virgin Atlantic, Cathy Pacific and Austrian Airlines are just a few instances of carriers offering gourmet afternoon tea as a specialty service. How about in economy, too? INDIA Vahdam Gets New Funding Vahdam is one of the leaders in the striking emergence of startups – up- starts may be a more appropriate label – in India that have set new standards of excellence in a tea market that historically has been underserved, fragmented and lacking in productivity and creativity. In October 2019 it announced new financing of $11 million. This values the firm at around $40 million. Like its main competitor, Teabox, Vahdam is built on an e-commerce platform plus a business model that focuses on eliminating the intermediaries in the supply chain that add delays and lose freshness. Teabox led this truly transformative mode that relies on building relation- ships with gardens and customized warehousing. Bala Sarda, Vahdam's founder, summarizes the inefficiencies of the Indian tea supply chain: "It's completely broken. The goods go through distributors, then get sold to exporters. Somewhere in the middle, brokers show up, too. Then an importer imports the tea. It all takes months to get a supply cycle to reach consumers. Unlike wine or whiskey, tea is best when it is fresh. Its ingredients lose flavor with time." Kaushal Dugar, Teabox's founder, lists the improvements his own company generated. It radically cut the time to deliver fresh tea to customers that averaged five months: "We acquire the tea [direct from the gardens] within 48 hours of production and ship it to our customers within a week." Both firms have built strong international marketing and selling capabilities. Both are targeting physical store additions to their base, with Teabox opening two stores at Mumbai and Bengaluru international airports. Taking tea at 36,000 feet

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