Tea Emperor

BRAND TEAS LACED WITH BULK CTC TEA RUINS TEA FOR CONSUMERS

Taiwan’s authorities, namely Control Yuan, claim that some local tea brands are laced with imported leaves and sold under the name of Taiwanese tea, which hurts the interests of consumers.

Tea farm on the beautiful island of Taiwan. Photo by Harry Huang.

ORIGIN MATTERS

Controlling body points out that sellers can blend local tea with imported tea, but tea sellers should clearly indicate the ration of imported tea and local tea. To me this sounds like the complains of the Indian Tea Board that encouraged their tea plantations to grow orthodox specialty tea. The underlying motivator seems to be protectionism.

IMPORTED GREEN GOLD

Taiwan imports around 25,000 tons of tea every year, 74 percent of which comes from Vietnam. The imported tea ends up blended with local tea and sold as a Taiwanese product, this is “unreasonable” and “hurts the interests of consumers.” Although Taiwan imports 19,000 tons of tea from Vietnam every year, one cannot find tea labeled as Vietnamese on the local market.

OUT WITH THE BULK

Tea Board of India has asked north-eastern states to focus more on orthodox specialty tea aimed solely at the international markets instead of the bulk “crush, tear and curl” tea, which they are mostly producing at present.

A well-managed tea plantation in India on a scenic area by the railway with steam locomotives.

BETTER TEA QUALITY MEANS MORE MONEY

Tea Board has the idea that the states should follow the Sikkim model while maintaining quality close to that of the Darjeeling crop. In essence it would mean that India would be able to produce larger quantity of high quality teas, which in turn would fetch higher price on international tea markets. This is important, because of the strengthening international trend of tea consumption bodes lucrative markets for high-end teas.

Tea Time's Sydney Hurstville Shop

As has written in this post, the most representative tea drinks in Taiwan - bubble tea (Pearl Milk Tea), has found its way to many Taiwanese people’s heart through years. Those like me who live abroad always can’t wait to get our hands on bubble tea as soon as arriving at our home land. During the past years bubble tea has started to be available also in some other countries such as US and Canada.

According to the CNA news in Taiwan, recently a Taiwanese tea chain - Tea Time, has successfully  expandning in big scales to mainland China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macao, Vietnam, USA, and Australia. Especially in Australia, six branch stores have opened in a short time span in responding to the demands and  locals’ high interests in franchising this concept.

Tea Time has already opened seven branch stores in Hong Kong before 2010 and two new ones are opening this month. A briefing occasion for those who want to join the franchising plan is to be held in Hong Kong tomorrow, Jan. 9.

Honestly, the news surprises me and arouses my interests right away. I just briefly checked Tea Time’s website and noticed that there are eight Tea Time stores in Taipei city where I come from, though I have never heard of it before. Well indeed I only visit Taipei shortly each year, but while asking my friends randomly from Plurk (a social media network favored by many in Taiwan), not all of them know about this tea chain. Among those who have visited Tea Time, some do give good comments on certain particular drinks.

So why such an internationally “relatively well-known” Taiwanese tea chain is not especially heard of by many in Taiwan? (at least among my random Internet friends)

My guess is: there are already so many well-established tea chains in Taiwan, naturally Tea Time is not necessarily everybody’s favorites. The fierce competition in this field also make it harder for newer brand to stand out in people’s mind. (Tea Time’s brand history in nutshell: it is the 3rd generation store of its predecessor Cha-Tai house (since 2005) and is officially established in 2008 in Hsinchu instead of in Taipei)

Although not at the moment being the most popular tea chain n Taiwan, Tea Time seems to be doing extremely well in its international expansion plan. I am curious to follow its development on this aspect and for sure this will be one of the tea places I have to drop by in my next visit.

More info:

www.tea-time.com.tw (in Chinese)

I wrote about how Sri Lanka wants to benefit from their internationally recognized brand of Ceylon tea. Like most things in life this is not without contradiction. You see, Sri Lanka Tea Exporters Association would like to have the right to import more tea to the island for blending and other processes that add value. Obviously

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW - TEA PLANTERS

The other party would like to create a strong brand for Ceylon tea so that local tea plantations would have plenty of demand for their products. A big part of this brand is that the Ceylon tea is cultivated locally on the island and is not diluted with imported tea.

They already made it with used coffee grounds - bio-fuel on the cheap. Starbucks is hoping to turn a hefty profit from something that they used to treat as waste and cost. That would mean more money to company coffers and therefore less upward price pressure for the sold coffee.

Now we have a Pakistani scientist that invented some sort of nano catalysts, which do their magic and turn used tea into bio-diesel. That is seriously good news for big tea users, unfortunately big tea house chains are not as common as coffee chains therefore it will be more difficult to put this invention into real use, because I’m not going to start producing home-made bio-diesel. Anyway, calculating in all the prior accomplishments of green tea we can now safely say that tea is going to solve all the problems in the world.