doing a dissertation on tea blends
Hi – This may not be the right place to ask, but as part of my final year dissertation I am writing about tea (major brands) and wondered if anyone knows which tea estates in Assam – Tetley and Twinings and PG Tip and so on use – they have it in the blend but can’t seem to find out – thanks
I’m pretty sure most of the big companies own their own estates. I know that Tetley got blasted for horrible conditions on theirs.
Just a quick google search.
http://www.beveragedaily.com/Manufacturers/Angry-TATA-Global-Beverages-instructs-lawyers-over-Tetley-tea-slavery-allegations
Unilever, who carries Lipton, PG Tips and a number of other brands, definitely has their own estates and factories. There’s a list on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands
If you go to Unilever.com and search ‘tea’ a bunch of information which may or may not be useful to you comes up. Like so http://unilever.com/resource/search/index.aspx?Search=tea
Are you going to look at some of the loose leaf tea companies?some of them are single family plantation teas.
With a little luck, you should be able to obtain a travel grant. Our university has limited funds for Doctoral students but there are competitive grants, special grants, and so forth also available. Go “shake the money tree” on campus, and then develop a questionnaire and so forth. Good luck!
Tetley has up to 80 different teas in their standard blend. In order to maintain consistency year over year, they keep a current “library” of 160 or so teas from all the estates they deal with/own, and blend it until it is as close as possible to their standard. Otherwise, it would taste different all the time.
That’s interesting do you know who is in the “library” the names of the estates are crucial to my research?
I wish I knew Rich! The person who I spoke to didn’t know. I’ve heard the same about Lipton as well.
I was under the impression that the major British brands mostly source their tea from East Africa now (Uganda, Tanzania, and Kenya, mostly), unless they are selling Assam as Assam. Maybe this is incorrect, but it might help explain why you are having trouble.
Also, the larger companies are starting to get out of the estate business (my guess is so that they can have plausible deniability about the conditions in some, but that may simply be pessimism.) At the moment, for instance, Tata-Tetley gets its tea through a series of subsidiaries that are made up of former Tata estates. Basically, they no longer own the estates directly, but the estates are so dependent on them for business that they still own them in practice. :) Here is a press release on Amalgamated Plantations from Tata: http://www.tata.com/company/articlesinside/8AkSmWQiOdk=/TLYVr3YPkMU=
Is the dissertation on blends or blending? Good blending manuals that are less than 100 years old are hard to find.
Tata still own 40% of APPL and as far as I know all the main brands use Assam in the blends – yes they want to distance themselves from the conditions of workers and use a variety of methods to do so. On blending and blends – it’s true about the manuals and I’d be keen to see a current one
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