INDIA
India’s domestic tea market history can be succinctly summarized as shuffling along. It wasn’t a national drink, but an export controlled by British colonialism and mercantilism. Chai emerged as a domestic home and street vendor brew.
The elite gardens of Darjeeling and Assam had very little domestic distribution. More recently, the bulk of the smallholder industry has been marked by commoditization and struggles to compete in the global market. Pesticides, worker poverty, labor shortages, yields, climate change, taxation… Shuffle, shuffle.
The best word now to describe tea in India is “Jump, jump.” India is creating a flow of new markets, services, and products. Here are a few examples:
Cafes: India has had very few places that serve tea with snacks. Chaayos, Chai Point and Tea Trails are filling the gap. Chaayos offers just about any combination of chai. Its base of twelve ingredients provides for many exotic permutations, a draw in attracting millennials and younger customers. Tea Trails targets the high end of the market, through exotic teas in “destination cafes,” ones worth driving to. Chai Point is stronger than Chaayos in the corporate market, through on-premise brewing machines. Chaayos is expanding home and office delivery.
Freshness: Teabox and Vahdam have paralleled each other in dramatically improving time, freshness, shipping and quality control along the bush to cup supply chain. They are becoming international brands and are helping Indian tea jump way ahead of China here. They are planning international expansion and selective opening of physical stores in major airports and city centers.
Flavors: Here are two popular teas listed in the Times of India in early January 2019:
Tandoori tea: “lovely, rustic and smoked flavor.” Made in a clay pot, using lemongrass, milk, mint leaves, sugar, and tea. Baked in a tandoor oven, transferred to a brass pot that lets the brew infuse by bubbling and oozing out of the clay pot.
Noon chai, also known as sheer chai, Kashmiri salted tea and pink tea: ingredients include a chai base, salt, bicarbonate of soda, poppy seeds, cardamom plus crushed pistachio and almonds and saffron strands as a dressing. Technology leverage: Teabox was an early implementer of software for customer relationship management and personalization. Chaayos has been a pace-setter in ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) platform to integrate inventory and operations. It is developing its Chai Monk “tea robot”, a machine for ensuring maximum reliability, consistency, and quality in brewing customized chai.
Chai Point is even further ahead in many areas of customer service, including the use of facial recognition as a password for its loyalty program customers. Its Box C is a brewer/dispenser that incorporates every leading tool of the Internet, cloud computing, point of sale and interfaces to customers and partners, such as payment systems. It even includes AI machine learning for real-time demand prediction.
This is all new and vibrant. It will coexist with and leverage the old Indian heritage of the wealth of fine teas from Darjeeling, Assam estates, Nilgiri and other regions. But “grown in India for export to the UK and Germany” will be complemented by “Served and drunk in India.”