Hundreds of kilograms of upmarket loose leaf tea are sitting in warehouses at risk of going off or being thrown out.
The Grocer has spoken to numerous tea brands that primarily supplied hospitality businesses prior to lockdown and are now left with excess stock – which in many cases is approaching its best-before date.
“For the last six months our income has shrunk to virtually zero and it doesn’t really look like it’s going to be returning any time soon,” said Chash Tea founder Dan Rook.
“It is a real issue especially for the more delicate and rare teas which deteriorate quickly. We were anticipating our distribution levels to continue and they went down to zero. And we’re still paying for the building [the tea] is sat in.”
Rook said he had tried to reposition the business with a greater focus on DTC.
“There will be stock left over and it is really not ideal,” added Arleen Ouzounian, founder of Nazani Tea, which sells herbal infusions and commissions its own harvests rather than buying from wholesalers.
Canton Tea operations director Alice Evans said while its stock position was “not at critical levels”, the coronavirus crisis had made forecasting near-impossible.
“We’re in a reasonably secure position where we have furlough and support from the government but countries we’re buying from don’t have that luxury, they are entirely dependent on being able to harvest and sell their crop.”
Ouzounian added: “We’ve had to slow down on our 2020 harvest because we need to shift the previous year’s. The knock-on effect will be that once we run out of 2018/2019 stock, we will have ordered less for 2020, so in 2021 we don’t know how it’s going to affect things.”
For small suppliers, pivoting into retail was not necessarily possible, she said. “Because our teas are small-batch and single origin we can’t supply very large amounts of any SKU. We do have online and yes, sales have gone up, but it’s not what we would be looking for.”
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