Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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THE WHOLE LEAF continued from page 57 we can compensate by altering the blending composition. We basi- cally try to bulletproof the product using different kinds of tea, whether it's in a sachet or whole leaves. Q: Do you actively go after new hotel accounts? What's your strategy? Sutherland: We do see significant referrals from our hotel cli- ents, but we feel that the tea world is still very small (especially compared to the brand power of coffee companies), so the vast majority of our customers—whether hotels or end-consumers— find us by word-of-mouth. Many chefs have remarked that we are the "secret ingredient in the kitchen." Overall, we focus on our job, which is to make the best tea and offer all the logistics support that is required of an outstanding vendor. Our clients come to us looking for the best and we make sure we deliver exactly what they want, when they want it. Q: What have you learned from working with so many world-class chefs? Chan: A lot of them had a lot to do with how we built product. We are lucky to be interacting with highly palate-educated culinary professionals who are not in the tea world, which is great because they're going to give us an objective opinion. Some teas have been made the same way for 50 or 100 years because that's what the garden workflow has been for decades. But the truth is some of 58 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com these teas just aren't relevant anymore. A great example is gun- powder tea. We're probably the only tea company in the world that doesn't use gunpowder at all. It's popular because it's really cheap; you can buy it at auction or direct from a garden for way less than other unfermented teas, but it's oily, tannic, and it's not vegetal or fresh. We found that when we put a collection of green teas including a gunpowder in front of an expert taster like a chef or sommelier, that person will always taste that gunpowder and say, "Gross, what is that? Get it out of here." Q: What's the most important thing to keep in mind when approaching high-end restaurants and hotels? Sutherland: The key point here is quality. It's not enough to just be in front of luxury-focused consumers; you need to impress the aficionado and show him or her that this is the very best cup of tea or herbal they have ever savored. That comes from years of hard work and dedication. You can't just slap a label on a tea bag and be "luxury" or "high quality." Chan: Picture [celebrity chef] Gordon Ramsay. That's the guy who is your client. Yeah, you have to be a little crazy to sell to him, but if you want to be the best, you've got to be able to sell to him and he's got to be happy with what he gets. In the end, it's probably easier to sell to McDonald's or mass market. They want consistency and won't scream at you every time something really small goes wrong.