Member Article

Brewing up a speciality storm

Tea sales might be dropping, but one company is bucking the trend through prodigious innovation and a global mindset

The UK might be drinking less tea overall[1], but this trend hasn’t affected English Tea Shop. In fact, the seven-year old company has just announced an ambitious growth plan that will see it expand from 50 international markets to 80 in just four years.

Launched in 2010, English Tea Shop’s focus on innovation, as well as its global outlook, has helped the company achieve astonishing success in a short period, posting a turnover of £22m in 2016, £8m of which was from the UK[2]. Not only that, the company is targeting a minimum of 25% growth in 2017, and has the ambitious target of doubling turnover by 2021.

While overall tea consumption in the UK is falling, speciality teas have gone from strength to strength, especially among younger generations. English Tea Shop, whose range includes 130+ organic teas and tisanes, is ideally placed to capitalise on this trend.

The company now sells 350m teabags each year worldwide – including at high-end department stores such as Harrods and Selfridges, and hotels such as The Grange and Strand Palace. English Tea Shop tea is also white-labelled in major foodservice chains such as Pret a Manger. A key focus of the company’s strategy is to increase sales of branded packs to the foodservice industry.

English Tea Shop is also unusual in that it was an export-first business. Although head-quartered in the UK, English Tea Shop initially focussed on markets such as the US and France, and only in 2013 did it tackle the UK market. Having such strength through diversity has been another reason for English Tea Shop’s tremendous growth, particularly as the value of the global tea market is rising year on year[3].

English Tea Shop, which owns and operates its own factory in Sri Lanka, is also a pioneer of sustainable practices in the tea industry. The company’s core philosophy is about putting employees and suppliers’ livelihoods first using the principles of value sharing. English Tea Shop only sources its organic tea from small-scale farmers with whom it builds long-term, close and mutually-beneficial relationships. English Tea Shop is committed to paying higher than the Fairtrade minimum price, and usually several times more than that. The company runs and is involved in numerous other initiatives to promote the sustainable sourcing of tea.

Suranga Herath, CEO of English Tea Shop says: “We are a young and lean business and our agility allows us to capitalise on emerging trends so fruitfully. We started this business because, having worked in the tea industry for years, we knew there was a better way to do things and clearly there is a big appetite for our way of doing things, both in the UK and around the world.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by English Tea Shop .