My tea math was right…

[peter]

A couple years ago, I wrote an article on Leafbox Tea called Are you getting the best value with your tea? It was one of the first places online that I talked about the future of tea in America was going to be found in the grocery store and that the real tipping point for tea will happen when tea companies start offering loose tea in packages in grocery stores (as opposed to tea bags).

I stumbled across something in our local grocer tonight that substantiates my claim to some degree, but only because I discovered that one company is doing just that.

Now, before anyone gets excited about the revolution coming, I’ll tell you that I found this example tucked up in the organic foods aisle (not the main tea aisle) and unfortunately hidden behind a 100-pack of plastic bendy straws.

The company is Guayaki Yerba Mate and it turns out that because of the way they market their products, they end up only in the organic tea section. They sit there alongside Numi and Zhena’s Gypsy Tea. It seems like that these days the organic loving eaters (who lobbied grocers to make it easier to find organic products) are hurting organic food-product producers by causing their organic products to be relegated to a segregated, lonely, and somewhat dusty section of the store where everything is expensive. It’s good that those things can be found, but the majority of shoppers don’t wander into the organics with much regularity. I digress…

Guayaki has a few of their products in the store, and they look good. They’ve got a chocolate Mate (which looks appealing to me), a green tea and their standard plain Yerba Mate. All the products are available in 24-packs of tea bags for $6.75.

The interesting part (and my validation):

Right next to the 24-pack of plain Mate in tea bags, was an 8-ounce bag of loose Mate. The bag was very similar to coffee packaging, but smaller since tea leaf products take up less space and in the unique colors and style of the company. The price? $6.89.

Why is this a better value?

That 24-pack contained only 2.4 ounces (76 grams) of product in it versus the 8 ounce package of loose (225 grams), so for only 14 cents more, you could buy well more than 100% more tea product than if you chose to buy it in tea bags. The economic value is somewhat obvious – but from a business marketing perspective is the convenience value worth spending that extra 14 cents? Also, are the two products marketed to two different consumer segments?

It was fascinating to see the exact same product side-by-side in two different forms of packaging. Though I’m not too familiar with Yerba Mate, I can’t say if there is also a corresponding leap in quality with the loose product vs the bagged product (are we talking about dust or whole leaf?).

Regardless, I continue to maintain my stance that remodeling the grocery store tea aisle, improving it, and getting loose tea into consumer’s hands via grocery store distribution is the real gold mine in the American tea industry. Though hiding it in the dusty corner of the grocery store behind the plastic bendy straws means we all still have a lot of work to do!

[Author]

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