Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/491368
STiR tea & coffee industry international 73 Inside the 'Yutai oriental' café on the second floor of Wuyutai tea shop you can grind your own matcha powder us- ing a table stone mill. Patrons can stay as long as they like for RMB50 ($8). The store provides a complete matcha set in- cluding a Japanese whisk for those who want to drink freshly ground matcha. Tea espresso and make-it-yourself matcha are new retail concepts. It is too early to tell whether customers will em- brace these and other retail innovations as China's tea companies probe for cre- ative solutions to ambiguous challenges. Convenient packaging Customers walking through Wuyutai and Hua Xiang Yuan tea stores now find most products offered in small, conve- nient packages. According to the sales staff at several stores, tea tins of small quantity, such as 20 or 50 grams, are well-received by customers. The top-selling product at Yu Cha Yuan, a tea supermarket in Beijing, has consistently been the mini Pu-erh cake, a moderately-priced 6-gram individual pack. Propelling this trend is the shift from the high-end buyers to less-affluent con- sumers. Tea has long been one of the most popular gifts in China, especially among government and state-own enterprises who formerly reserved a fat percentage of their budgets for tea gifts. The price of tea gifts remained high because the money was com- ing from the state's budget and not their own pockets. It was not a best practice by any Wei Wen Bin, owner of Yunitea, is demonstrating the making of the tea beverages using an espresso machine.