Generic Black Teas
Hi,
This is my first post here so I will give as brief an introduction as possible. I’m a new cafe owner who has worked in fast casual restaurants my entire life and am well acquainted with Mighty Leaf and Rishi products. Now that I have more freedom with what products I use, I’d like to explore other options for black iced tea. After spending a little while searching on reddit, I found this website from a post made by a user with the handle tealifehk. Needless to say it’s easy to go down a hole when it comes to tea, and I’m starting to understand the grading process, and have somewhat of an idea where the quality dropoff probably happens. Now to the point of this post.
My primary goal is to upgrade my quality while maintaining a price that isn’t too much more than what I was paying before (or is possibly even a better price). I’m a small guy right now, but I plan to expand my operations and possibly start my own iced tea business (so scaling would be important). I don’t want to start sourcing a product from a company, and then find out that they can’t accommodate me once I reach a certain volume. Should I be searching on Alibaba (although I read tea exporting is possibly in flux with them), or look to a vendor within the United States? Is it reasonable to buy a black tea and package it myself, or do tea vendors offer this service? Thanks for your time, and I look forward to contributing on the website.
Patrick
Welcome to the forum Fontana. If I were you, I’d reach out to Yunnan Sourcing about wholesaling. They are one of the most reputable tea shops online – check out the plethora of reviews for them on this site – and their teas are often dollar-for-dollar the best value out there. Alibaba can be dodgy because you don’t know where the tea comes from nor do you have any real assurance about quality.
Rishi is good but in my experience, their markup is almost always higher than online vendors on the same teas. For example, 1 lb of Dian Hong black tea is $49 on Rishi’s site. YS has 10 varieties of Dian Hong for $53-$60 for 2.2 lbs. You didn’t mention how much tea you needed to source, but if you go on their site you can see exactly how many quantities of a particular tea are available for purchase.
Hire some individuals with international origins but living nearby to help you. Have them go to to the local store and pick up a ton of PG Tips or Lipton and bring it to your house. Then you can make an exaggerated story about how you had to hire several people with very distant national origins to carefully select this tea and bring it back to you so you could test it and see if it met with your very particular tastes. You don’t have to mention they only had to walk across the street or that their “careful selection” was picking the PG Tips box that hadn’t fallen on the floor and gotten stomped on. You don’t need to mention that these international helpers were actually living down the street from your shop. And you don’t need to mention that your “particular tastes” are just “whatever was available”.
This way you can tell a fantastical amazing story which makes your tea sound exquisite and exotic and you’ll still be technically correct, the best kind of correct.
Thanks, Luckyme. I will research YS and their products.
Ralf, your humorous suggestion is funny and ironic, because I know that there are plenty of people nearby doing exactly what you’re saying. My goal is to do the opposite, and let people decide for themselves whether they like a good product or a hyped product. It will help develop a real customer base, and I can focus on engaging with people that actually have taste buds. Thanks for the chuckle.
lol, no problem. It could be a good way to make huge stacks of cash. You would have so much cash you’d have to hire people to carry it back to your house. But your plan to be authentic and honest seems like it could work too. Also, people might appreciate it and become more loyal to your brand. Good luck.
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