STiR coffee and tea magazine

22 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 2, 2018 (April / May) sounds unlikely to build a market, and matcha moving from an expensive, specialized fine tea to a superfood, beer ingredient, latte and wellness tea. Perhaps the biggest surprise is China becoming a major export market for Indian and Sri Lankan black tea and English name brand tea bags. China produces 2,600 million kilograms of tea a year. 80% of this is green and 18% oolong, with black, white, and puehr together totaling 2%. It imports around 340 mkg annually, almost exactly 10% of its own export volumes. The China surprise is the very recent demand for often average quality black tea in the world's largest and longest- lasting green tea culture. Here are recent figures: • Indian shipments to China rose to 8.3 million kilos in 2017, from 5.5 mkg in 2016. 98% of India's production is black tea so the two countries are not in competition with each other in the intensely competitive global market so there is plenty of room for growth. • Sri Lanka's exports to China grew 30% in 2017, to 9.9 mkg. Over the past years, they have increased by 230% • Lipton is established as the upmarket brand leader in China. Its low-end tea bags are hip among the Chinese young and Lipton markets aggressively to them. Brands are new to China's tea industry, which has always been marked by local distribution and regional and pedigree names (Wuyi Tie Guan Tin, Longjing Dragonwell.) One well-publicized initiative is Lipton linking up with top Chinese fashion designers to launch its pop-up tea bar at Shanghai's Fashion Week. • British tea houses are proliferating in China's major cities. Annvita's Victorian living room stores have expanded to over a hundred locations. This probably makes it the world's largest server of cucumber sandwiches. Its Taiwan-born founder, Ann Chiang, targets younger, well-educated profes- sionals, particularly women. Annvita is able to charge $30 a pot for British Rose, Earl Grey, and Darjeeling tea, • Sales of Taylor of Harrogate's Earl Grey and English Breakfast teas have doubled in each of the past three years. Upmarket younger shoppers associate tea bags with safe and clean and seem strongly influenced by the posh British culture portrayed in such TV series as Downton Abbey and Sherlock Holmes. Much of the growth is in Hong King but also Shanghai and Beijing. Black tea from India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, and Uganda as growth markets in a green tea culture… English everyday teabags selling as luxury… and cucum- ber sandwiches in Shanghai… What's the next consumer surprise? US Digital Printing to the Rescue The idiom of "The devil is in the details" very much applies to the major trends in the modernization of tea logistics from bush to cup. In particular, the phasing of the comprehensive Federal Food Safety Modernization ACT (FSMA) has a little imp lurking. FSMA sets policies and rules aimed at two priorities: prevention and accountability. Prevention aims at anticipating safety problems early instead of having to firefight after the event. It requires importers to define formal plans for Hazard Analysis and Risk-Based Preventive Controls (HARPC). Account- ability begins with know your supplier and verify their safety, reliability, and authenticity of their products. Science- based testing, records access and many compliance processes support the FSMA aim at reducing the 48 million cases of Americans getting sick and 130,00 hospital annual from unsafe food. That's the grand scheme. Here's the devil: Printing. The question that is easy for any player in the tea market is "What is food?" Section 1o3 of FSMA (FFD- CA Section 418) states that it includes packaging. That means that the tea bags, box, tin, or air—freighted parcel from China have to conform to HARPC and ensure end-to-end accountability. The key here is digital printing. This is routine in home and small business. It is the direct printing of an image or text on demand, using inkjet or laser. It is more expensive than the offset printing that is cheaper for handling large volumes of output: tea bag labels, boxes, etc. Those are largely fixed in format and stable in content. The bar code is the permanent product identifier and doesn't change by the batch. When the marketing or ingredient information, new printing plates are made and a new run begun. Plates take time to set up. But they offer lower cost per output than digital printing and higher choices of resolution. Digital printing is best suited to small runs and does not require set up. It adds many challenges in types of ink – solvent, pigment – and substrate requirements – paper, fiber, metal. The core of FSMA is that all information must be timely, accessible and traceable. Much of this can be accommodated through wireless readers (RFID), blockchain (the emerging networks for recoding and tracking very detail in the history of a transaction) but in more and more instances, the printed information must be at a level of specificity than is time- and context- dependent: batch identification, testing and authentication indicators, etc. Tea firms will need to address the transition from offset to digital. They have plenty of options but one detail – an extra devil – is who leads it? The IT department has the technical expertise but not the knowledge of materials, design and presentation while the Marketing Function is likely to overlook many of the cost, technology and vendor/contracting issues. One point is clear: tea companies will have to make digital printing a core part of their plans for supply chain integration and exploitation of the many business benefits skilled implementation of FSMA can bring them. UC Davis Tea Institute The University of California at Davis announced it will establish a Global Tea Institute for the Study of Tea Culture and Science. Professor Katharine Burnett, the institute's founding director, envisions "an umbrella program, binding together the professors and librarians who remain in their home departments." "The institute would draw endowed chairs in at least four different disci- plines (e.g., health sciences, agriculture and environmental studies, humanities and social sciences, etc.), to underscore the diversity of the approaches engaged in our vision and make these diverse approaches permanent fixtures of the institute," according to Burnett. Learn more: globaltea.ucdavis.edu

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