18i3_Tea_Report
Purple tea growing in Kenya
KENYA
A group of 130 smallholder tea farmers in Kenya has registered a new company whose goal is to market its unique premium offer: purple tea. Chai Imara Purple Tea Ltd., with an initial investment of $100,000 that is small by international standards but substantial for the parties involved. It has been enough to get results. 230,000 seedlings were planted in the past year.
Purple tea has been one of the major recent transformations, not just innovations, in modern tea growing. It was developed over a 25-year period in Kenya.
Its distinctive characteristic is its anthocyanins, antioxidants that give blueberries, pomegranates, red grades, and cabbage their purple color. It is very high in the catechins found in green tea that is widely viewed as the base for its health benefits.
Prices show the opportunity. Purple tea sells for 10 times that for green tea: around $30 a kilo as against the early 2018 average of under $3. The plant is hardy and adaptive: it’s positioned as a specialty green tea with a fuller, sweeter, and more woodsy flavor than more vegetal greens. It offers a rich taste with relatively low caffeine.
The challenge in Kenya is to leverage the leaf transformation into a broader industry one. Kenya is the world’s largest black tea exporter but faces potentially crippling threats: a pattern of increasingly severe droughts, labor unrest plus government wage-rule intervention that while socially desirable threatens the barely breakeven profit levels. Purple tea is made by just a hundred or so of the country’s 600,000 smallholders. Channels of distribution for Kenya tea are built for scale with 80% of sales going through a small number of multinationals. Entrepreneurial growers are selling direct to online retailers. There has been a lag in opening processing factories. The tea must be harvested from mature leaves. Taxation, oligopolistic barriers to entry and restrictive practices and being eased but this is still a small volume of Kenya’s production, just 10 metric tons in 2017.
The future rate and degree of growth in purple tea seem a supply chain issue. One of the lessons of recent years is that the consumer market is receptive to premium teas that offer complex new flavors and contribute to wellness.