Tea Blog

Who will be the Starbucks of tea? Don’t laugh – it’s a phrase that’s cropped up in recent years as tea’s popularity continues to grow and Starbucks remains the 800-pound gorilla of the hot beverage market. In fact, it’s a phrase that’s become popular enough to return about three thousand results on a Google search.

But will there ever be a Starbucks of tea? Or for that matter, should tea sellers be striving to be the Starbucks of tea? And what do we need to do to take tea to the next level, particularly here in the United States, which has seen substantial growth in the premium tea market but which is still primarily a nation of coffee drinkers?

Some would say that aiming to be the Starbucks of tea kind of misses the point of premium tea. They point to the perception that coffee culture is about hurry up and go and the hefty caffeine jolt provided by the beverage, while tea is more about kicking back and relaxing with a beverage whose caffeine punch is offset somewhat by the mellowing effects of theanine. On the other hand, we’ve all seen plenty of people kicking back in a Starbucks and making a cup of coffee last a good long while.

According to one beverage industry insider, the tea industry could learn a few things from the success of coffee. Richard Haffner of research firm, Euromonitor, said recently that one of the areas in which coffee has performed better than tea is in finding profitable niches. Of course, one could make the argument that tea people are already starting to get the hang of this one. Haffner also said that “Starbucks introduced a premium taste that wasn’t there before.” It’s a point that you can hardly argue with, but you could also argue that in doing so Starbucks helped pave the way, at least in some measure, for the growth of premium tea.

As an interested observer, I’d go so far as to say that tea is doing quite nicely for itself these days and to get to the next level it just needs to keep on keeping on. And whether or not we’ll ever see a Starbucks of tea is maybe something we shouldn’t be fretting over so much. But now that you mention it, there is one well-known British tea merchant who recently announced that they’re thinking of opening a chain of tea shops. Hmm.

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