The Dutch imported tea to Europe in 1610. In 1662, Catherine of Braganza brought her habit of drinking tea to England after married to King Charles II of England. It was not until the 19th century, afternoon tea became popular in England.
The promotion and popularization of afternoon tea is attributed to the Duchess of Bedford and Robert Fortune. In 1848, Fortune took 20,000 tea seedlings, 17,000 tea seeds and 8 tea workers from China to carry out trial planting in Java, India and Ceylon. Finally, Wuyi tea was successfully planted in Calcutta, which later becomes the world-famous Indian black tea. Since then, the Indian tea industry has been rapidly emerging, providing a steady supply of around 90% of the tea for the British tea market.
A Scottish businessman named Thomas Lipton saw the potential of tea products and bought a number of tea fields in Ceylon. Sir Thomas found cheaper ways to package and transport tea and it available at his grocery stores to the man on the street. He named the black tea brand “Lipton”. In 1972, Unilever acquired the entire Lipton brand and Lipton became the world’s most popular black tea brand and the number one tea brand in the world. It is also the third most purchased non-alcoholic beverage by consumers worldwide, after Coca-Cola and Pepsi.
Since 2019, Unilever’s tea business has begun to show signs of declining sales, mainly due to the decline in demand for black tea in developed markets, and British black tea is the largest business in its tea business revenue, accounting for more than 60%. At the end of 2021, Unilever announced the completion of the sale of its tea business to private equity firm CVC Capital, a European PE powerhouse, for €4.5 billion on a cash-free, debt-free basis.
Analysts believe that the main reason for Unilever to divest its tea business is the decline in demand for black tea consumption in developed markets. However, looking at the global tea production, it has been in a state of continuous growth.
Since 2009, tea consumption in the United States has continued to grow at a rate of 8%. The United States is now the third largest importer of tea in the world. The United States has never seemed to be considered a member of the “tea drinking nations”. Although by virtue of the size of the economy and population base, the U.S. tea consumption is among the highest in the world, but the culture of tea drinking is not as popular as in China and Britain. Although the early colonists also brought the custom of afternoon tea to North America, tea never achieved the status of “national beverage” here as it did in England. But in recent years, tea seems to be quietly conquering the taste buds of Americans.
According to a 2018 report by the American Tea Association, about 80% of Americans have the habit of drinking tea, and among younger millennials, the proportion is as high as 87%.
As the pandemic enters 2020, people are eating out less, restaurants and teahouses on the streets are closed, and the demand for tea in the restaurant industry has plummeted by 70%. But people who are home to avoid the epidemic have turned their homes into “tea rooms” to settle their minds and bodies, and with more time at home during the epidemic, drinking tea has become a new hobby for many Americans. Some tea stores online sales increased by a whopping 75%, supermarket tea sales also maintained a 20% increase. Peter Goggi, president of the American Tea Association, said, “I’ve been in this industry for 40 years and have never seen such a large increase in sales.”
But the recent rise of tea-drinking has something different. Previously, American tea merchants have created tea beverages with American characteristics based on the characteristics of their own markets, enriching the face of the world’s big tea drinking family. As early as 1903, Roberta C. Lawson and Mary Molaren from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, applied for a patent for the invention of a tea bag similar to teabags. But they were unsuccessful in bringing their inventions to market. It was not until 1908 that Thomas Sullivan, a New York tea merchant, pioneered a way of promoting tea. He packed the best tea in carefully sewn gauze bags and took them back to customers as samples for promotion. In the tea bag, there are finely crushed tea leaves, and the tea leaves are chopped, because this allows the tea leaves to be fully steeped in the shortest time and release the aroma. This saves the trouble of straining the tea leaves, and the tea bags are becoming popular among tea drinkers.
What is the difference between this wave of tea drinking craze? According to a report by the the American Tea Association, black tea, which has traditionally been popular with Westerners, is showing a downward trend despite still occupying an absolute proportion of consumption, while green tea from China and high-end specialty hand-made teas of limited origin and process are increasingly sought after, including Pu’er tea, a representative of specialty teas. On the Amazon shopping site, buyers were unstinting in their praise, “Anyone who loves tea will fall in love with it. It is brewed to a beautiful red color and never tastes burnt or bitter like the black tea I drink” “I ordered this tea for my grandmother and this tea has helped her lower her cholesterol”. Also as a result, in order to taste the special tea, the number of people who drink hot tea is gradually increasing among Americans who originally do not like to drink hot water. Especially the American millennials and Generation Z, they are more open-minded and want to know more about the terroir of tea plantations, different tea cultures, and they are eager to know the “story behind the tea making”.
The pursuit of health, convenience, novelty and high-end is the modern consumption trend. No matter what your pursuit is, take out your tea, make a cup of tea and have a sip.