Unilever, producers of PG Tips and Lipton teas have recently been reporting on market surveys showing the changing tastes from British consumers for our traditional favourite brew. We have all seen the dramatic increase in coffee shops over a couple of decades and an explosion of drink variations away from the long establish limited tea or coffee, with or without milk. Previous blogs have commented on coffee choices today compared with my childhood in the sixties when the vast majority of us drank instant powdered coffee with very little fresh ground coffee consumed. Espresso, Cappuccino, Latte and Mochaccino were a foreign language to most of us back then! The increase in coffee consumption will clearly have squeezed UK tea volumes but there are also other factors at play.
Perhaps tea is finally playing “coffee catch up” with an ever-increasing choice of herbal, flavoured and “exotic” teas jockeying for position on the retailers’ shelves. Today the black tea used in the nation’s favourites including PG Tips, Typhoo, and Yorkshire Tea, is losing significant sales volume with 330 million less cups of tea consumed overall in the year to May 2019 compared to the previous year.
Here at KSV, “for your coffee and tea”, we offer fruit, herbal green teas alongside the more traditional PG Tips and Taylor’s Yorkshire black tea and we also have some exciting new wellbeing herbal infusion teas launching very shortly, for our Flavia range of machine. Don’t get me started on our vast range of coffee options too!
Written by: Colin from KSV.