STiR coffee and tea magazine

52 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2017 (April/May) Bringing Tea to the US Overseas tea producers seeking to enter the US market face long odds. This is how Australia tea supplier Planet Organic played the game and won Food Innovation Australia, Ltd. (FIAL) played an important role in the succesful placement of Planet Organic tea by bringing together several firms with aspirations to enter the US. Above they meet with Chris Oldfield, Australian Trade Commission consul general and senior trade commissioner (light grey suit). To his right is Janis H. Grover (red blouse), to his left Najib Lawand, FIAL general manager market development. Brian Condon is in the back row, center holding up his packaged tea. By Dan Bolton COOLUM BEACH, Australia It takes about 12 months to launch a product in the US with most of that time spent getting the basics right. Long before their first sale, tea suppliers must first meet food safety and labelling requirements and deal with logistics and supply-chain challenges. They will have con- structed detailed spreadsheets to analyze costs to arrive at a practical range of prices. They will have secured financing, devised a marketing strategy, and decided the ideal launch date and public relations events. Suppliers will have secured a broker and dis- tributor and amassed sales data to make a convincing case as to why their brand will displace a tea already producing revenue on some retailer's shelf. In short, they will have spent a lot of money and enlisted a lot of help knowing that only a small fraction of products succeed. The fail rate for domestic producers large and small is estimated at 70-90% for food products introduced in the US market. Inez Blackburn, a professor at the University of Toronto, told Food Processing maga- zine, "The failure rate for new product introduction in the retail grocery industry is 70-80%. For smaller US food businesses launching new products, the success rate was 11.6%." No reliable etimates are available specifically for tea suppliers. "What usually happens is that suppliers look at America as a large market with a lot of affluent customers," explains Janis H. Grover, principal at Grover Global Food Marketing in New Jersey. "They don't realize the market here is complex and multi- layered," explains Grover who has worked with hundreds of brand owners evaluating the likelihood of success as they study the American food market. Australian tea supplier Brian Condon seeks impromptu advice from a food broker at the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. Plant Organic's new packaging

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