STiR coffee and tea magazine

20 STiR coffee and tea / Issue 3, 2018 (June / July) Tea Report: Peter Keen FRANCE First National Tea Competition Non-profit AVPA, an organization that hosts competitions throughout France, conducted its first Teas of the World competition in June. Winners will be announced in July. The competition is open to any company with a traceable tea that is clearly identified, unflavored, whole-leaf, and unblended. Judging is based on gastronomic rather than standardized referencing. Teas are brewed both in a pot and gung fu style. Lauren Pascault, AVPA contest leader for tea, explains that "events are the best way to draw attention (from the professionals, the media, the general public) for an industry in need of recognition and standardization." She said that cooking became a professional activity because the last centuries saw associations, competitions, and training bodies work to protect workers and set their qualifications. "Coffee has gone the same way with the Specialty Coffee Association, which works worldwide to provide state-of-the- art training and competitions. Tea has not yet succeeded in organizing itself, and it will take many initiatives to do so globally: the AVPA "Teas of the World" contest is one of those," she said. Agence pour la Valorisation des Produits Agricoles (AVPA) first hosted contents for edible oils 15 years ago. A coffee competition was added in 2012 and bottled waters in 2016. Learn more: www.avpa.fr/thes-en KENYA Marketing Purple Tea A group of 130 smallholder tea farmers in Kenya have registered a new company whose goal is to market its unique premium offer: purple tea. Chai Imara Purple Tea Ltd., with an initial invest- ment of $100,000 that is small by international standards but substantial for the parties involved. It has been enough to get results. 230,000 seedlings were planted in the past year. Purple tea has been one of the major recent transformations, not just innova- tions, in modern tea growing. It was developed over a 25-year period in Kenya. Its distinctive characteristic is its anthocyanins, antioxidants that give blue- berries, pomegranates, red grades, and cabbage their purple color. It is very high in the catechins found in green tea that are widely viewed as the base for its health benefits. Prices show the opportunity. Purple tea sells for 10 times that for green tea: around $30 a kilo as against the early 2018 average of under $3. The plant is hardy and adaptive: it's positioned as a specialty green tea with a fuller, sweeter, and more woodsy flavor than more vegetal greens. It offers a rich taste with relatively low caffeine. The challenge in Kenya is to leverage the leaf transformation into a broader industry one. Kenya is the world's largest black tea exporter but faces potentially crippling threats: a pattern of increasingly severe droughts, labor unrest plus government wage-rule intervention that while socially desirable threatens the barely breakeven profit levels. Purple tea is made by just a a hundred or so of the country's 600,000 smallholders. Channels of distribution for Kenya tea are built for scale with 80% of sales going through a small number of multinationals. Entre- preneurial growers are selling direct to online retailers. There has been a lag in opening processing factories. The tea must be harvested from mature leaves. Taxation, oligopolistic barriers to entry and restrictive practices and being eased but this is still a small volume of Kenya's production, just 10 metric tons in 2017. The future rate and degree of growth in purple tea seems a supply chain issue. One of the lessons of recent years is that the consumer market is receptive to premium teas that offer complex new flavors and contribute to wellness. Alternate Energy Energy costs have created a vicious cycle in Kenya's tea production. High oil prices pushed factories to substitute firewood boilers for oil furnaces. That creates far-reaching local impacts: Trees are harvested early in their growth for fast cash. They are often not replaced by new plants. That adds to the deforesta- tion that seems unstoppable in many regions of Asia. A firewood boiler in a Kenyan tea factory, such as that at Makomboki consumes six trees per hour of operation: 15,000 a year. Makomboki has two boilers, requiring up to 30,000 trees annually. Makomboki has demonstrated the immediate and immense payoff from switching to briquettes made from biomass waste. It has entirely eliminated the use of timber. The briquettes are made from waste material collected from farms and saw mills: macadamia, cashew and rice husks, straw, sawdust, etc. Mills often burn the sawdust just to get rid of it. Makomboki's network makes it easy to collect the biomass. It is one of Kenya's 66 factories and serves 5,600 smallholder farmers. It has 132 leaf collection centers. The quantified operating savings are impressive. Its energy expenses fell from $542,000 to $295,000. That does not take into account the investment cost of the boilers. Makomboki benefited here from a donation by the Living Earth Foundation. This small example is easy to replicate. It's local, small in scale, does not require the education and mobilization many other areas of sustainable development require. It provides hard cash savings and also provides many environmental benefits, not one at the neglect of the other. For instance, the sawdust in briquettes gets fully consumed with no particulates, heavy smoke and air contami- nation. Such micro gains give smaller farms a chance of surviving the economic, climate and productivity challenges that darken their days. Policy change is far more complex and out of their control or even in opposition to their interests. This includes taxation, subsidies and incentives. Funding the future will determine if initiatives like Makomboki are the blueprint for the new mainstream of farming practice or a one-off. Purple tea growing in Kenya

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