Founded 12 years ago, the first few years were a bumpy ride for the Boulder-based brand. “We collectively were looking to grow way too big way too fast,” founder and CEO Maria Uspenski told FoodNavigator-USA.
“We failed at selling a high price-point loose leaf tea product,” she added. It’s an experience that led The Tea Spot to rethink its retail strategy. It pulled out of store distribution and focused on wholesale and e-commerce.
Today, after its trials and errors, the brand is prepping to launch 10 SKUs in sachet form for retail distribution in the coming months.
An everyday wellness drink
Uspenski’s observation is that most American’s don’t have tea as their top-of-mind beverage. More look to coffee for their caffeine boost, or sugary soft drinks. The MIT mechanical engineer described herself as someone that “needed coffee to be approachable.” But before she hit the age of 40, she was diagnosed with cancer.
Not that there’s anything bad with coffee, she pressed—it’s just that all this time there was another beverage many studies have suggested could thwart cancer mechanisms. “My daughters were still young, and I didn’t want to end my relationship with them early—when I was at the end of dealing with the raging part of the disease, I started to look to long-term wellness,” she said.
So during this time when she tried to get her hands on every study she could find to help her lead a cancer-free life, tea was something she came across constantly. “A lot of the studies I came across talked about tea, in particular green tea. And so that became a non-negotiable part of my day, I drink five servings a day,” she added.
Blends to taste delicious
The Tea Spot’s differentiator is its blends and Steepware products, a collection of mugs, infusers, and pots designed for on-the-go tea-drinkers, some of which were designed by Uspenski herself. Uspenski said the company’s purpose is to “make blends so delicious that people will want to drink tea every day.”
“In the beginning we were absolutely not your connoisseur’s kind of tea company. They’d say ‘those are beginner’s kinds of tea’ because we blended with flavors, florals, fruits, et cetera—just to make them so tasty that people would come back,” Uspenski added.
Addressing and targeting newbies was a key component in addressing the health and wellness equation of her company’s mission, she said. Today, the company also sells single-origin, unblended teas, but its blends remain some of its most popular products.
Pu’erh, chicory, matcha, and other coffee alternatives
The Boulder Breakfast blend is The Tea Spot’s top-selling product. Black tea-based with chocolate essence and pu’erh (a fermented black tea from the mountainous Yunnan province in south western China), Uspenski reckons its popularity is driven by its flavor profile, which is similar to coffee.
Another popular product is Wild Chicory Joe, which is even more similar to coffee but without the caffeine. In the past few years, The Tea Spot has been selling a lot of matcha, “there’s a huge trend for matcha in the United States,” Uspenski said.
But despite its large selection of blends, the upcoming launch back into the retail channel will feature only 10 SKUs of the sachet kind—five organic varieties and five conventional. “We are now in a position where we’re not co-packing, we’ll be making our own tea sachets, and that’s the point where pricing and volume makes it possible.”
“This is the point where I’m confident about going into market with half the price we went into [with] loose-leaf,” Uspenski added.