Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/1190334
STiR coffee and tea 23 Let s meet at... ´ hall 9 / booth 9 – 323 Organic tea solutions – for your success. www.wollenhaupt.com 12 – 15 FEB 2020 Nürnberg, Germany www.biofach.de Enjoy with confidence Vertrauen in Genuss Vahdam plans to use its additional funding to strengthen its international network and set up additional offices in the US and Europe. It already has a strong presence and fulfilment capability on Amazon. Teabox announced an estimated additional funding of $5 million in July 2019, adding to its late 2017 $7 million in equity financing. Its aim is total vertical integration internationally through an "omni-channel" experience. Vahdam and Teabox are upstarts in the sense that each brings something to the market that doesn't fit existing strategies and struc- tures. Other small tea firms that share these features are transforming tea retailing and hospitality in a market that has mainly been for at home family consumption. Chai Point and Chaayos are leading examples. Chaayos' co-founder (2012), Nitin Saluja, commented in a press article that India consumes 30 cups of tea for every single cup of coffee. His studies showed that there were around 1,500 coffee cafes in India and zero for tea. Chai Point, Chaayos's larger upstart rival has 100 locations with revenues of $10 million. Chaayos now has more than stores in India and is expanding. Saluja describes getting tea accepted outside the home was "a daunting" task that took two years of "thorough" research to study consumer preferences and habits. While each of the upstarts has a clearly different identity, they share common features in moving tea outlets closer to tea preferences. Tea Trails, for example, targets the opposite end of the market from Chaayos, offering high end exotic teas in "destination cafes" worth visiting. Chai Point is stronger than Chaayos in the corporate market, through on-premise brewing machines (this segment now amounts to 30% of revenues.) Chaayos is expanding home and office delivery (20% of sales.) Behind the differences are the same driving forces of innova- tion: convenience + variety + personal- ization + technology leverage. Tocklai Tea Research Struggles The final word in an October 2019 headline in the Sentinel Assam newspaper captures the turbulent history of one of the world's most highly reputed centers of tea science and development: "Tocklai Tea Research Institute in Severe Crisis Again." [emphasis added here] Its staff are on strike, again. It faces a funding emergency, again. Founded in 1911, Tocklai is the oldest tea research organization in the world. Focused on meeting the needs of Indian growers, it has a long list of contributions to quality and productivity improvements, including clonal tea developments, climatic studies, biotech and farming services and education. It even created a tea wine in the hopes of stimulating a new market. The problems that threaten the survival of Tocklai, center on financing. Tocklai Tea Research Institute