The New Instants Technological Advances in Soluble Coffee and Tea

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By Peter Keen

Instant coffees and teas are becoming cool — literally so, i.e., cool in how they are now being processed, in contrast to the long-established high-heat, big-freeze, and heavy-pressures methods. They’re also cool in the more colloquial sense that the innovators behind them are creating premium, gourmet, specialty, and wellness beverages that are excellent, trendy and – well, cool.

Both beverages have a long history built up on offering convenience. There’s no need for equipment, fast and simple serving without having to choose the best temperature and viewing time, no waste, light in weight, easy storage, and smooth and complete dissolving of the dry powder or particles. And all of this at a low cost, made practical by using commodity bulk beans and leaf, waste, processed waste, and powdered additives including sugar and dry milk.

The processing shaped the product: a spoonful of uniform particles. That contrasts with gourmet coffee and specialty tea for which the processing shapes the flavors. Instant beverages lose many of these. In particular, the “volatiles” that produce the enticing aromas of the drinks are lost. This is a result of the very high and very low temperatures that are the base for extracting and concentrating the ingredients and dehydrating and forming the solids that dissolve quickly and conveniently in water. Spray-drying blows air at a temperature of 480°F (250°C) through a 75-foot-tall tower. Freeze-drying chills the slushy extract to -40°F.

It’s a harsh process that basically creates drinks that are convenient but relatively lacking in richness of flavors. It doesn’t nurse and nudge the aroma notes, mouthfeel, aftertaste, umami, and other subtleties and nuances. It loses most of the tea’s antioxidants associated with wellness and the subtle nuances of coffee roasting. There’s no point in using a high-end coffee bean like, say, a Costa Rica Tarrazu or a Castleton Moonlight Darjeeling first-flush white tea. They’ll end up very much the same in the final drink as an average alternative.

Well, actually, there are plenty of reasons for using them, if you switch to cold brew-based processing and augmented technology, including screening to remove contaminants and heavy metals and vacuum dehydration. Instant puehr tea? Kagoshima sencha? Double-roasted 100% Arabica espresso? Mount Hagen organic instant Papua New Guinea? Sure. The new generation of instant beverage technology brings out the many dimensions of the ingredients. So, start with the best.

The history of instant coffee: brand staying power

Instant coffee and tea have long histories — one for coffee and two for tea. The innovation of today in teas goes back to the instant tea path begun about 1,300 years ago and closed off by order of the Chinese Emperor in the 14th century. It anticipated cold brew principles. The long and continuous path of traditional instant tea is marked by solid progress and evolution but less and less originality and innovation.

Instant coffee was patented in the UK in 1771 as a “coffee compound.” The first “cakes” in the US were launched in 1851. A New Zealand chemist patented a “dry hot-air process” for a soluble coffee in 1890; coffee powder was invented in 1901. The step that established the mainstream for instant tea was made by George Washington — no, not that one but George Constant Louis Washington— in 1906. He put the developments together to create the first commercial product that dominated the growing market for 30 years. In the 1930s, Brazil faced the problem of excess production of coffee that spoiled easily. The national Coffee Institute contacted Nestlé. It took close to a decade to develop a better-tasting new instant coffee: Nescafé, launched in 1938.

Nescafé remains the best-known name 80 years on. Borden grew its own base, from an estimated 12% market share in 1946 to 25% in 1954. Maxwell House launched freeze-dried instant in 1963 and captured 40% of supermarket sales by the 1980s.

The relevance of the history today is that it is more a burden than a benefit. These are legacy companies, with a boring product generally viewed as mediocre. It’s convenient, but so is Starbucks. Instant coffee peaked in the 1970s when a third of all US-roasted coffee imports was for the instant brands. Now it’s half that. Ho-hum.

Nescafé has recently moved aggressively away from its everyday convenience image to build a trendy high-end identity and new customer base, especially in China where the rules of the game changed from “ho-hum’ to “get creative.” The instant coffee market is growing fast there and it is a trend-based segment. It is hard to think of Nescafé as a product served in high end cafes but Nestlé’s new generation Fruity Ice Coffees, launched in mid-2019, are just that in China. They are infused with flavors of peach, pineapple, and green apple and can be brewed with ice and sparkling water for a fresh summer drink. The aim is “to attract young consumers with a more affordable yet unconventional coffee-drinking experience.” Nescafé’s sales have grown at an annual double-digit percentage rate.

Other innovators here are adding salted caramel, whisky and oak flavors, pea protein, and almond milk substitutes for powdered milk, and a focus on cold brew infusion of premium Latin American and the new crops of Yunnan coffee beans. The main trends are for sweeter, fruity, and floral flavors.

The history of instant teas: back to the future

Tea history has two paths: the loose leaf and the tea paste routes. The paste tradition was the base for trade – puehr bricks were portable and fungible – medicine and nutrition. They were an early form of cold brew: letting the water and leaves slowly create chemical reactions among their 600 or more compounds, meld their flavors, and bring out their antioxidants and nutrients. The juice is rich in polythenols, to a degree that three centuries after one emperor banned the production of puehr bricks, another made Cha Gao his personal medicine and brought all its farming into the Imperial Palace.

It once again disappeared from the mainstream in the centuries of chaos, warlords, foreign invasions, and breakdown of civic society of the 19th to mid-20th centuries. Now, modern technology is leveraging it, improving aromatization, and eliminating harmful ingredients. There’s a growing range of varieties of what is a concentrated essence of puehr: Hei Zhen Zhu “Black Pearl,” “Jade Dragon Surpasses Snow,” “Lucky Strike.”

It’s a perfect path for a new style of instant tea. The leader here is Pique Tea, whose business model, products, and marketing are entirely different from the loose-leaf path and explicitly built on the founder’s experience in the remote areas where Cha Gao is still made.

It employs a patented “cold crystallization” of pedigree teas for around eight hours at a low temperature. The processing screens out toxins and preserves a very high proportion of the antioxidants associated with wellness benefits, especially gut health/fasting/calmness.

The teas are pedigree, not commodity. They include family-farm-grown Uva Sri Lanka black tea, puehr, China greens from Zheijiang Province, ceremonial grade matcha, Fujian white peony, Kagoshima sencha, lily oolong and jasmine green together with highly rated Earl Grey and English Breakfast and a range of fasting teas. These are gourmet teas.

Cusa is a smaller follower along the same path. Its marketing claims to be the very first, with its own patented cold-steep technology and a smaller product range. It emphasizes organic premium teas from smallholders. The public data suggests that Pique was the early pacesetter, sweeping the gold medals in the three Global Tea Championships in 2018. What is most consequential is that the two represent a complete rethink of instant tea and are targeting the high-end market in terms of customers and distribution outlets, including Whole Foods, Wegmans, and HEB, though both companies are primarily online in their business focus. Instant tea as top-of-the line product versus a struggle to overcome the stigma of instant tea. That’s transformation, not just evolution.

The other well-trodden mass market path of loose-leaf tea led to the tea bag and relied on mostly cheap commodity ingredients, machine processing – the CTC cut, tear, curl method – and blends. Nestea, the iconic brand launched in the 1940s, is firmly based on the complex process that amounts to beating up the tea, heating it, freezing it, drying it out, sweetening it, homogenizing the powder, and using joint ventures (Coca Cola was a long-term partner) to make and market it.

Nestea has been jolted to make radical changes. It has been relaunched through a collaborative development venture, with an emphasis on fruity flavors and a much-improved base ingredient of Nilgiri tea from South India. What the recipe no longer contains signals its renovation and a step shift in just about every characteristic of customer appeal: no artificial colors and flavoring, the end of corn syrup as sweetener, and no GMO ingredients. Natural flavors include raspberry, peach, and lemon.

Instant excellence: a new high-end niche?

This summary of shifts in the instant coffee and tea markets is, of necessity, impressionistic. They are fragmented with many players competing in both beverages, opportunistic startups, and large companies looking for acquisitions. The surge of growth in Asia, driven by a combination of the search for variety and originality of flavors may or may not move from trend to routine. Convenience may become secondary to functional niche, quality and premiumization. Or not.

That said, there are several simple reasons to pay attention to the instant market and its innovation. Maybe one word is enough: original. It’s become very interestingly original, technology-paced, excellent in ingredients and products, flavor-rich.