How costs tea brand name Birchall has actually rejected cost battle for top quality

Dan Graham claims it “feels like yesterday” when, throughout the mid 1990s, he was driving around coffee shops in the south-east of England attempting to flog the household firm’s tea bags. “Weekly sales were about £50 and it’s a bit disheartening because I think I used to work harder then than I do now,” he jokes.

Thirty years on and Graham is currently taking care of supervisor of the costs tea brand name Birchall Tea, a 5th generational company which has actually rejected the cost battles in the industry throughout the years and is currently considering a ₤ 10m turn over target over the following 3 years.

It was Graham’s terrific, terrific, terrific grandpa, Captain Birchall Graham, that grew the very first tea shrubs in 1872. Injured throughout the Crimean War, he had actually gone back to the UK in his very early 20s prior to being published to India and getting some land in Darjeeling after observing tea’s financial worth.

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Birchall has no web links to India today– Captain Graham is hidden in Darjeeling– with its mass tea service based in Mombasa, Kenya and the firm currently the globe’s biggest merchant of black tea out of East Africa.

“It’s not just tea from Kenya, it’s Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda,” claimsGraham “Those countries collectively produce more tea than any other region in the world. It’s shipped down to Mombasa, the centre of the tea trade, it can be blended, packed and shipped and we export to 30 different countries.”

Birchall’s extensive tea cups example 5,000 various sets each week, with around 40 sufficient to make it right into blends. This includes its Great Rift item, a mix of Kenyan and Rwandan tea.

In 2004, Birchall Tea, which claims being the only tea brand name to have actually won 13 successive years at the Great Taste Awards, acquired a tea hacienda in Rwanda, with the federal government wanting to privatise the market at the time. Birchall marketed a years later on after changing the story for its tea pickers.

“We believe Rwanda produces the best tea in East Africa because it’s right on the equator,” claimsGraham “It’s a very high altitude, which is perfect for growing tea; you need lots of sunshine, but it also needs to be cold and you need lots of rainfall.

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“The African highlands have those three elements perfectly, while the volcanic soil that Rwanda has adds a sort of brightness and golden colour to the tea.”

This year Birchall Tea, which sells about 50 million kilos of tea annually, commissioned a YouGov survey which revealed that 87% of Britons didn’t know that Africa produces tea, while 55% of UK adults were unaware that many tea bags on the market contain tea dust and stalk, rather than whole tea leaves.

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“>Birchall Tea is urging consumers to look inside their tea bags for colour.

The firm also unveiled its “Seeing Is Believing” campaign, citing a video which has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube.

claims“The point was to show people what to look for in a cup of tea and in your tea bag,”

“If the tea in the tea bag is black, it’s from the leaf and the bud from the tea bag which is really what you want. There are less fluorides in the leaf and bud as well, which means it’s better for you.”

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video-player”>Birchall Tea remains buoyant thanks to a fully solar-panelled factory in Wiltshire following a £5m investment in 2018. “We’ve got state-of-the-art teabag machines from Italy and Japan and then it’s directly out to our customers,” says Graham. “We try and get the tea in, packed, out and drunk ideally within 12 to 16 weeks.”

“If they can make more money they’ve got the resource to pay better and make living conditions better. If you buy the lower end, you’re going to get lower quality teas, sometimes the teas are selling for less than the cost of production and it’s actually loss making.”

yf-1pe5jgt”>. “>Graham says the company has never compromised on quality with the tea industry – which saw Typhoo Tea bought out of administration for £10m this month – having undergone a competitive price war over the years.

“We’re just not at that end of the market,” adds Graham. “Our expertise is in tea blending, finding the very best teas and putting them together at a pretty competitive price.”

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