Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/46786
TEA AND COFFEE: NATURAL PAIR OR ODD COUPLE? Coffee and tea are very different beverages, with different appeals, usually at different times of the day. Can the two coexist in the same shop? If you use the criterion of at least 10 percent of sales in tea, the two biggest chains that combine coffee and tea sales are Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, based in Los Angeles, with about 750 outlets, and Peet's Coffee and Tea, based in Emeryville, Calif., with about 250. David De Candia, director of tea at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, readily admits that tea is a "red-headed stepchild" there: "It really has to work at making itself seen." Part of the problem is that, when it comes to sensory factors, coffee tends to overwhelm tea. Not just in taste or smell, either: Even the noise of the grinders and other equipment can get to tea drinkers. "They tend to kind of take the serious the tea drinkers out of sorts," De Candia says. "They want to have a nice cup of tea, and , they're hearing [the grinder], they're smelling the coffee. So it's very difficult to kind of mesh the two." There also are issues about expecting baristas and other staffers who are primarily oriented toward coffee to sell and educate customers about tea. "When you're in coffee-slash-tea shop, and that barista's been making espressos all day long and he gets a few tea drinkers coming through and they order green tea, it's somewhat likely that that barista may forget to say, 'You know what? Aſter three minutes you should remove that tea, because it will become bitter,'" De Candia says. Coffee overwhelms tea in another way, too: Volume. In general, coffee is a significantly higher-volume business than tea. About 20,000 of the approximately 25,000 retail coffee outlets in the U.S. gross more than $1 million annually, according to Dan Bolton, publisher/editor of World Tea News (and former editor of this magazine). Almost no teahouses will reach that mark, Bolton says: "I'm not aware of a tea-only café that has passed $500K in sales." He estimates that adding quality tea to a coffeehouse's lineup might tack on $150,000 in sales if all goes well. De Candia says Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is making an effort to make tea more prominent. "We call it the doubling down on tea," he says. "Because it is our hidden gem—it's in our name. So we've been pushing really hard over the last couple of years to focus on tea in different ways." One of the keys is to provide the right kind of ambience for tea drinkers, who tend to be more contemplative and less hurried than coffee customers. De Candia says the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf store in Montecito, Calif., features an area with couches and other comfortable seating, away from traffic zones, designed to appeal to tea drinkers. "If you're a tea drinker in the sense of the person who wants that little area maybe...and you don't get it, then it's more like, 'Hmmm, maybe I'll buy the tea and take it home, or maybe I'll just skip it,'" he says. "I think that's an important factor that the industry has to not overlook, because if we all don't create that environment for tea in these coffee-slash-tea shops, then it's probably not going to grow like we all want it to." Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf is the largest chain with significant sales in both coffee and tea. 14 | November 2011 • www.specialty-coffee.com When her shop opened, "we were well aware of the tidal wave of tea shops that would soon appear on the market," Broughton wrote in an e-mail. "We also strongly suspected that many of the tea shops would try to go for the mass market: making tea more modern, sexy and fast/accessible. "We didn't want that for us," Broughton continued. "We believe our model will stand the test of time amid the throngs of high volume, bustling take-out type models. We chose this model because it reflects how we, as business owners and tea drinkers ourselves, feel about tea. We believe tea is almost ceremonial...something to slow down and enjoy." SALES TO GO On the other hand, much of the tea that tea shops sell isn't enjoyed in the shop. In another important contrast with coffee, teashops oſten sell considerably more dry tea for home brewing than they do tea brewed on the premises. Bolton estimates that across the industry, brewed tea accounts for as little as 5 percent of the average teashop's sales, while dry sales account for 60 to 65 percent. (Sales of teaware—pots, kettles, mugs, infusers, etc.—make up the remainder.) "In our shop, the scale is very tipped toward the dry product sales. That is not by accident in our case," Broughton wrote. "It was never our desire to be in the 'food service' business." Broughton added that tea brewed on premises oſten complements the sale of dry tea: "By allowing people to do take- out cups of any tea in the shop, they feel a little more adventurous to try something new—inevitably this leads to buying that tea off the shelf at a later date." As customers at The Teahouse in Santa Fe, N.M. are drinking their tea, the staff oſten will bring a dry version of that tea to the table and inform them it's for sale. Owner Dionne Christian estimates that 80 percent of the time, this approach results in a sale. She is now transitioning her dry tea stock from metal urns to big glass jars, the better to show it off: "Whatever is in glass, we sell out of that one in no time," Christian says. g rrr