How a very British cuppa left its rivals gasping and became a top name in tea

LIKE one of its own delivery vans easing along a Dales lane, Yorkshire Tea is gaining ground. Its rivals may once have characterised it as a quaint little business in a quiet part of the country but no-one could say that today.

When tea drinkers settle down with a cup of the local vintage on Yorkshire Day, this Sunday, they will be enjoying a taste which is now popular up and down the land.

The iconic brand replaced Typhoo as the third-most popular tea in spring 2005 and now it is says it is growing faster than the competition with the value of its tea-bag sales rising by 15 per cent year on year. It has also got its sights trained on PG Tips and Tetley, the present top two.

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There are several reasons why Yorkshire Tea has grown. Strong customer loyalty, market penetration across much of England and resisting the temptation for constant re-designs have all played a part but James Prentice, brand manager, says there is more.

British shoppers have always been a savvy bunch, he says, but as the nation has been stuck in the economic doldrums over the last two years, Yorkshire Tea has benefited from people's desire to buy a drink they trust.

The firm's famous caddies – which, since 1984, have been adorned with painter Lizzie Sanders' watercolour scenes of the region's rolling countryside – have helped to project an image that is constant and reassuringly unflashy.

"We have stuck to that because it works well for the people," Mr Prentice said. "The brands that have done well are those which are comforting. That is what tea is all about.

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"When it works that well, why would you look to change it? It is important to make sure you are not seen as overhauling your product for the sake of overhauling it.

"People don't want to be over-marketed to. In this age of austerity, people are hyper-conscious in terms of price and the value they get out of a brand."

Yorkshire Tea is part of Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate, whose origins go back to 1886. The tea won new recognition in 1984, however, when it started advertising on television. It went on to create the commercial in which an amorous couple break off from a moment of passion on the sofa to have a brew.

As that memorable advert showed, the firm may be traditional but it is not staid. The scale of its operations, which include tea and coffee importing and blending, tasting, testing, packaging and distribution, is huge.

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Behind the moment of calm provided by a cuppa, however, is a dynamic business that imports from 11 countries, devises its own tea recipes, and is part of the Bettys and Taylors group which also includes a cookery school, tea and coffee merchants Taylors, and the Yorkshire Rainforest Project, which is trying to save an area of rainforest the size of the county.

Mr Prentice said that despite, or perhaps because of its regional roots, Yorkshire Tea has also come to represent something quintessentially British, perhaps because of this region's claim, with major cities, rolling countryside and a long coastline, to be a microcosm of the nation.

"Tea equals Britishness and Britishness equals Yorkshire. Perhaps that is why it works well on a national level."

Tea bags made by Yorkshire Tea are worth 52.8m a year, which is 12 per cent share of the UK market.

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It has also been helped by a lot of repeat custom. After all, you can imagine lifelong drinkers of the tea taking a pride in their loyalty in a way they wouldn't if they were consuming orange squash or cola.

Mr Prentice said customers have a strong degree of "ownership" of Yorkshire Tea and points at figures showing that for every 100 a Yorkshire Tea drinker spends on all teas over a year, 42 of that is spent on Yorkshire Tea.

"The history and the heritage is still very apparent here. There is not a region in the UK where Yorkshire Tea is not in growth and that shows it has become a national brand."

It is a truly international operation, however. Tea and coffee is imported to Teesport from the likes of India, Tanzania, Uganda, China, Sri Lanka and Kenya and is then brought to Harrogate and stored in a huge onsite warehouse. The tea comes in sacks – tea chests

are no longer used – totalling 200 tonnes a week, which

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are then blended to secret recipes, using up to 24 or 25 types of leaf.

The tea goes through blending drums and then eventually goes through one of a series of packing machines – named Nidd, Wharfe, Swale and Esk – which turn leaves into the finished, boxed product seen on supermarket shelves. Each one of these is coded so if a customer has a complaint then staff at the factory can check when the box was made and find out what went wrong.

Not all companies of this size show such an attention to detail but Yorkshire Tea remains a family-owned firm with its own set of values.

If you want a few clues on what these are – just look at the calm, enduring and vibrant images of God's own county on its packet.

HARD WORK BEHIND EVERY TEABAG

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A cuppa may just be a pick-me-up at the end of a long day but at Yorkshire Tea it is the product of days of research, tasting and analysis.

The firm tastes about 900 cups of tea a day in its sale room in order to create the best possible blend.

Sanjay Kumar, an Assam-born, Ugandan-raised commodities buyer and tea planter's son, who now works at the firm's Harrogate base, said the team has a total of about 90 years of experience in teabag tea.

The Yorkshire Post tried seven teas in the sales room, ranging from Yorkshire Gold to Darjeeling, "the champagne

of teas".

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Tasters brew the samples to double strength so that any tiny imperfections can be easily spotted and weeded out, Mr Kumar explained.

It also tests the blends with both hard and soft water in order to imitate the varying conditions across Britain.

The tea buyers travel a lot in order to maintain a close relationship with the network of suppliers, visiting them all over a two-year period. It means they can look at the conditions in which the tea is farmed before it is blended in Britain.

They also work closely with Cristina Talens, Bettys and Taylors ethical trading manager, who has visited communities in Kenya, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru to see the conditions in which tea and coffee crops are harvested.

She carries out social audits, which involves interviews with farmers and their workers and looking at conditions and infrastructure such as mills and pulping stations.

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