serve food, she's not going to change her mind anytime soon. "If you go into foodservice, even in a tearoom, you have
to go through the health department," Montague says. "That means bathrooms, that means sinks, it means cooking, it means hiring more people, and it just didn't seem like it would serve what we wanted to do." Broughton takes another tack, saying, "Tea drinkers like
their sweets, I tell you!" She does all the baking ("a hidden passion of mine") for her shop but has to do it off-premise, since All Things Tea has no kitchen. Doing her own baking allows her to experiment, especially with a line of baked goods that use tea as an ingredient.
CONSUMER CONSCIOUSNESS Whether they serve food or not, one of the most important
long-term missions for the retail tea industry is consumer education. The consciousness of quality issues in specialty coffee—origins, flavor notes, blending issues, etc.—simply doesn't exist yet among tea drinkers as a whole. "Tea is very far behind coffee, still, so as far as even consumer
awareness of origin," says Linda Appel Lipsius, CEO of tea retailer and supplier Teatulia. "I think it's way, way lower." Even with a concept as elementary as single-source product,
a lot of education remains to be done, Appel Lipsius says: "They're not even necessarily asking the question to begin with, so we're sort of introducing the question." Consumption patterns play a large part in opportunities for
consumer education about tea. In the U.S., some 85 percent of tea is consumed iced. The major competition for iced tea is soſt drinks, which presents a good entry opportunity for tea, Simrany says. "There's so much pressure on the soſt drink industry, with
the empty calories, concern for obesity and everything else," Simrany says. "I think there's a growing tendency for consumers to move away from that beverage into more natural alternatives such as water or tea." Specialty tea retailers should take advantage of this
opportunity, Appel Lipsius says: "There's such an ah-ha moment that you can actually upgrade your iced tea and make it a specialty iced tea." Another strategy might seem counterintuitive: Competing
head to head with coffee in certain aspects. Chai and other varieties of specialty tea can give as much of a kick, in terms of flavor, as coffee, Simrany says. "Chai—I've referred to it in the past as a bridge from the coffee consumer to the tea consumer," he says. "And there are
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