Evy Chen is the founder of Boston-based Evy Tea. She gets plenty of press – from Forbes as a young entrepreneur of note, from the tea industry as the pioneer of cold brew tea, and from tourist and foodie coverage of her teas, two tea bars and a converted 1976 Airstream mobile bar.
Chen will tell her story during the World Tea Expo. “I call it bottle your dream,” she said, “it’s a presentation on how to enter the ready-to-drink market.”
Chen said formulating fordistribution in bottles and cans enables tea companies to “increase brand valueand product volume by supplying grocery stores and other outlets.”
Her teas are a strikingaccomplishment and bring together most of the features driving tea innovation.If a team brainstormed for a weekend to come up with the perfect tea for ourtimes, the whiteboard would be scrawled with:
- Start from reality: the U.S. is an iced tea andRTD nation – more than 80% of the market. It is convenience- and mobility-centered:pick up at the gas station, take to the gym, choose for easy hydration, asubstitute for sodas or just a pleasant relaxant. The mass market supermarketstaples are also low-grade leaf plus a dictionary load of sweeteners: cornsyrup, fructose, refined sugar, erythritol, aspartame, acesulfame potassium,maltodextrin, sucralose and saccharin.
So, make aconvenience drink with a much higher quality and flavor than what is, in EvyChen’s words “fast food tea.” One of herfirst tea offers communicates the style and craft focus: a premium white teawith chamomile and lavender.
- Build on where innovation is fueling growth:Three forces are transforming beverages: wellness, flavors andtransparency. In tea and coffee, theold commodity staples that aspired to mediocrity and rarely achieved it arelosing market share – hot coffee sales dropped 3% in 2018 and the emblematicEnglish black tea has seen ex-drinkers switching to flat latte coffees for adecade. Botanicals, spices, matcha, turmeric, hibiscus are turning RTD labels to“Organic, of course.”
and “Naturally, natural.” The master blenders are producing exotic, colorful,smooth and beautifully balanced healthy teas with never an -ate, -ite, -ose orpoly-pheno something additive added.
So, adapt coffee cold brew totea as a recipe for a master chef to bring out a range of distinctive combinationsof body and nuance.
It took around three years for EvyChen to transfer cold brew methods from coffee to tea. ‘I was the first tobring to market cold brew – ever.” She was brought up in China’s tea heartland.At school in the U.S. she missed both the flavors of leaf tea, and the sense ofcommunity it embodied. She observes that cold tea and sugar were not part ofthe Chinese tradition and that while there were plenty of places in Boston forsocial gathering, they were built around alcohol. She called her own outletstea bars, not tea houses or tea shops. Her overall assessment of tea in the U.S.was it is “mainly a boringgrandma” drink or too sweet.
Cold brew eliminates heating thewater in processing. This preserves more of the nutrients and allows theflavors to be absorbed over a 16-hour period into the liquid. This produces asmooth and robust base for flavor enhancement that is low in caffeine but hassome zippiness. Evy Chen contrasts her teas, which include an oolong withrosemary and orange zest, with the power punch peach, citrus and otherflavorings that disguise the lack of fresh and subtle tea taste in the water.
Her business career was launchedby winning a prize of $5,000 at Emerson College, in Boston, in 2011. She beganwith a narrow range of four teas. At one of the first showings of the teas, shewon The North American Tea Championship (2013). Whole Foods contracted todistribute her tea and Evy Tea’s wholesale business has grown consistently from100 commercial accounts to around 500 outlets.
In 2014, the company opened itsfirst tea bar, in the disused commercial garage that had been its initial headquarters.This is in “a forgotten corner of the neighborhood” in a part of Boston that itis to fashionable Newbury Street in the Back Bay as Queens is to Fifth Avenue,Manhattan. (It is located almost opposite the Sam Adams brewery, a fellowpioneer in a traditional industry.) Growthin business and reputation has been marked and smooth. Sales areestimated as in the $2 to $2.5 million range. This is still a small business,dependent on the personality, skills and drive of its founder. It is localized.It may or may not scale but it is certainly on a winning track. That is worthmusing over while enjoying a bottle of Back tea strawberry basil.
Sources: Boston periodicals, Boston Magazine, Boston Herald, WBZ4 CBS Boston; tea and coffee Industry press
Dive Deeper in this World Tea Expo Session
How to Break into the RTD Game will cover how an entrepreneur can launch ideas from market assignment, to formulation, packaging and finding a market niche on Wednesday, June 12, 2019, 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 P.M. in Room CB6.