Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/48160
primed for retail growth—both in Southern California and India. Recently, the 49-year-old Shah talked to Fresh Cup about how he developed his tea-market prowess, what allowed specialty tea to gain a foothold in America and why, in the end, quality trumps all. 41( What was your first job in tea? 2A( When I was in college I started working for a tea brokering company called the National Tea Company in the city where I am from, Coimbatore. This was 1982, and the city had become a tea auction center because some major companies had labor issues in what had been the big tea center in the area, a city called Kochi. The companies decided to move everything to Coimbatore. When you're a broker, your job is to basically collect samples from dif- ferent sellers who are conducting the auctions every week. On the average you would probably have 800 different lots that are being sold at an auction. You make smaller versions of those samples and send them out to your customers throughout the country. Everyone can't be at the auction site, so they would keep us as their agents and pay a commission. 41( Is that how you really learned to taste tea? 2A( Right. I'd taste at least a few hundred every week to make sure every tea was in order and that we weren't buying a tea that wasn't the right strength or was too fluffy or very light. All kinds of things came out depending on flaws in the manufacturing. 41( Where were most of those Nilgiri teas going at the time? 2A( It was actually going to the Soviet Union. Everything manufactured was pretty much sold to the USSR. India was a Cold War ally of the USSR, and they gave the Soviets a great exchange rate. [Russia] could buy anything at a fantastic price. The Soviet government was providing tea to all their people, so they just bought tea from all over India, blended it together and distributed it. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, however, the entire country became price conscious, and they started buying CTC teas and looking at alternate suppliers like China where they could get teas cheaper. The Nilgiri teas were out of reach, and once that big buyer was out of the market, a lot of other people came in and started buying. 41( That's about the time you established yourself in the United States. 2A( Yes, I set up shop in the United States in 1989. I moved here in 1986 and spent some time working with my cousin in New York; he owned some Indian grocery stores. Around 1984, the Indian government made this bonehead decision to overnight put a duty on all tea leaving the country, which angered a lot of companies and got Indian tea kicked out of the blends of Western buyers. Lipton was particularly angry. At the end of the 1980s they reversed that decision, and there was this opportunity to see if those teas could be sold back into the U.S. market. I said, "OK, if continued on page 48 FRESH CUP MAGAZINE "%