In the Bag
The Ongoing Revolution in Specialty Tea Bags
Story by Amy C. Rea/Photograph by Ness/Pace Studio

Tea bags. They're the top-selling tea product in the United States-and the most despised. They're sold by the millions through supermarkets, offered by servers at the finest restaurants, available at airport concessions and in hotel rooms. Yet like the classic Rodney Dangerfield character, "they don't get no respect."
   Now, however, tea bags are taking on new forms, and a new attitude. Specialty tea businesses looking to capture new markets are cashing in on the bag's legendary convenience while trying to convince a dubious industry that good tea can come at the end of a string.

The Real Thing
It's easy to see why specialty tea connoisseurs knock tea bags. Traditional flat paper tea bags hold only the dust and fannings left over after whole-leaf tea is processed. These particles are packaged-crammed, actually-into a paper tea bag, often bleached paper, and attached to a string with a staple. The paper bags can impart a papery or dusty flavor to the tea, particularly if the bag is bleached, while the staple can add a metallic tinge to the flavor as well.
   And yet, there they are, atop the market, a triumph of convenience over quality, say the enthusiasts. But it was not always so.
   "The American tea trade was one of the major casualties of World War II," says James Norwood Pratt, author of New Tea Lover's Treasury and co-creator of the Tea Society (www.teasociety.org). "In the thirties, almost 25 percent of tea consumption was green tea. Tea bags constituted well under 20 percent of the U.S. market. But during World War II, we were cut off from Asian teas. The big tea packers, all of whom were operating under government control, began to find that the two grams of tea that you could put in a tea bag, no matter what kind, was a very profitable thing. By the end of World War II, these were well-established in American supermarkets. They were the first of what became hundreds of convenience foods. By 1947 or 1948, when an American tea importer on the west coast finally was able to bring a large shipment of oolong into the country, they found that in spite of the fact that there had been an enormous market for oolong in this country before World War II, they couldn't sell any of it. Tea bags had become the 'real thing.'"
   Tea bags remain the dominant tea delivery system in the U.S. tea market. Specialty importers, by and large, have kept aloof from the world of tea bags. But inevitably, the two worlds began to interface.
   In the early 1980s, the Fuso company of Shizuoka, Japan, a division of the Nasa conglomerate, developed a nylon, non-woven pyramidal tea bag. The motivation was financial: to add value to the product by creating a more visually appealing form. In addition, the bags were ultrasonically and simultaneously sealed and cut, reducing the time needed to produce tea bags by the old heat-seal or staple method. At the same time, in England, engineering consultants for the industry giant Lyons Tetley developed a method for producing round tea bags on conventional equipment. In 1996, British company Unilever Brooke Bond introduced its PG Tips pyramid bags after four years of research and development.
   All these developments had one goal in mind: increase sales of bagged tea. They succeeded beyond the wildest expectations. Tetley's round bags, for example, resulted in an immediate 30-percent jump in sales, returning the company to market preeminence.
   Yet the language was all about quality. According to Brooke Bond, the pyramid's three-dimensional shape provided 50-percent more room for the tea leaves to move around in when hot water was added. The result was said to be better infusion and more flavor.
   Big business was clearly on to something, and the specialty market took note. Tea enthusiasts in the U.S. began seeking out ways to create tea products that give consumers the quality of whole leaf tea with the convenience of tea bags. Gary Shinner, founder of San Francisco, Calif.-based Mighty Leaf Tea describes the change this way: "What you've seen in the tea category is a trend towards quality that is happening in other food and beverage categories, like coffee." Tea enthusiasts like Shinner wanted to find ways of offering the whole-leaf tea experience in a convenient format like a tea bag to make it easier both for home use and for commercial applications such as airplanes, hotels, doctor's offices and even coffeehouses that might be unwilling or unable to support a full-scale loose-leaf specialty tea program.
   Mighty Leaf imported machines to make nylon tea pouches, which are not pyramid-shaped but are loose bags that accommodate whole tea leaves, rather than the traditional dust and fannings. Similar in concept to the pyramid but without the tetrahedral form, the pouches are large enough for leaves to expand somewhat during the brewing, and they are made of materials which would not, according to the makers, impart unwanted flavors, such as that of staples, bleach or glue, during the brewing process.
   Amy Paulose is vice president of brand development for Fife, Wash.-based Teaosophy, which has developed tea pods, related in shape and function to the tea pyramid, that also use nylon materials for similar reasons, but they have a biodegradable product as well. "Our tea pods are biodegradable, because we were concerned about ruining the environment," she says. "The pods begin degrading within 30 days. But the nylon is nonreactive, and the pods are large enough to allow the tea leaves to expand while brewing, giving more surface area for brewing. More surface area takes more extraction, so the tea won't have the bitterness and the tannins, those strong flavors that are extracted as a result of the small sizes." The varieties of whole-leaf tea bags now include silk products, nylon products which are either stitched with cotton or heat-bonded (no glue used), and dioxin-free, staple-free paper bags.

Judging A Tea By Its Bag
Once a tea producer has committed to whole-leaf tea bags, the options of what to put in the bags is as extensive as the varieties of teas available in general. "Most high-quality tea purveyors can put excellent tea in these pods," says Paulose of Teaosophy's tea pods. "The scarcity of the machines limits the varieties, but that will change. Right now, we use the basic varieties, because Americans have been drinking horrible teas for years, and we have to . . . introduce them to good, basic, high-quality teas."
   Mighty Leaf Tea's Shinner sees a world of possibility. "We have no limitations. Orchid oolong, very full and curling leaf, essential tea, whole chamomile blossoms and chunks of fruit and herbs-we can use them all. That's the beauty of tea pouches. You get the full spectrum of flavor, from the front of the palate to the back."
   Alicia Schnell of Bethesda, Md.-based Honest Tea adds, "The use of organic teas is of particular importance in teas, as tea is one of the few agricultural products that is never rinsed or washed after harvesting. The first time the tea leaves are rinsed is when they are immersed in your tea cup. Tea has been grown and drunk without pesticides for thousands of years. We don't see a need to change that now."
   As the varieties of whole-leaf teas become more widely available in convenience packaging, the potential for their use increases as well. Tea bags are not only popular on the supermarket shelves with the at-home consumer, they are also favored by commercial foodservice operations which want to provide beverage options for their customers, but most of these operations don't have the time or manpower to slow-brew pots of tea. Whole-leaf tea bags, pouches and pods could change the way Americans are served tea through foodservice operations.
   "We do have a couple of different hotels and restaurants using our product," says Paulose. "For them, it's a great, great opportunity. Traditionally, restaurant settings are hectic; they don't have a lot of preparation time, so they've been staying away from loose-leaf tea service. Plus, there were kitchen problems-servers would prepare the tea, then dump the leaves in the sink, causing major clogs. There's a huge potential for expanding tea service on an individual order in foodservice, huge interest from hotels and restaurants. It creates an interactive experience, a talking piece for the customer."
   Schnell notes that her company's products are available through a number of the Smithsonian Institution museum cafÈs, as well as a number of coffee and tea shops and delis across the U.S. Mike Harney of Harney & Sons sells whole-leaf tea bags through coffeehouses in Barnes & Noble bookstores, a venture he was at first worried about. "We were hesitant about whether a large chain could handle this sort of thing," he admits, "but they've done very well."
   Have these new tea bag products reached their promise of providing high-quality specialty teas to everyone? Not yet. Partly, the problem is technological. New tea-bag machines produced in Japan, Argentina, Italy and elsewhere are incredibly complex, involving video cameras for quality control, gas flushing systems for freshness, humidity chambers for denser packing, as well as more speed, reliability and volume. They are also four to five times as expensive as a traditional machine. The technology is new in the U.S.-the companies quoted here have had their machinery less than five years, and in some cases have only been producing their tea bags for less than two years. Consequently the production and distribution has not yet reached the level of a full-scale retail and wholesale blitz. Says Schnell, "Our tea bags will not have realized their promise until they are readily available everywhere." Until then, the growth rate is likely to be much slower than that of traditional tea bags, for one primary reason: the cost of tea and production.
   The other cause for slow growth may be more persistent: tea culture.

Guilty By Association
Even as these machines become more available and more tea producers begin experimenting with ways to expand their whole-leaf tea offerings, it isn't likely that these types of products will run flat tea bag products out of business. Larger factors in the tea industry will continue to favor traditional tea bags, and may even increase their predominance. Better machines will make it even more cost-effective for larger producers to bag their tea. As this increases the retail per-unit price point, big profits will result. At the retail level, the growing popularity of blends seems to favor bag-based delivery systems. Even factors such as the recent tsunami may aid bags, as devastated areas like Sri Lanka could be obliged to turn to high-volume sources of fast profits during reconstruction.
   "The paper tea bag will never go away because of the cost difference," says Paulose. "The tea pods material costs quite a bit more. Flat paper tea bags will co-exist with tea pods. The price and quality difference will appeal to different customers. That's why interest from the grocery market is very high, extremely high, because they see the ability to create different price point categories within this product category."
   Schnell agrees. "We feel there will always be a role for tea bags," she says. "They allow people to enjoy the tea drinking experience in a quick and convenient manner." Shinner compares the growth of these products to the different levels of coffee co-existing in the marketplace. "Just as there's a place right now for ordinary coffees alongside the specialty and gourmet products, so the premium whole leaf tea market will continue to increase while paper tea bags will not disappear. But whole-leaf teas will become more mass as well, not just specialty."
   As for possible innovations in this segment, Harney doesn't see anything new in terms of the bags appearing anytime soon. "There's nothing I see coming out of Japan, and that's where all of the innovations begin," he says.
   Instead, any changes or innovations will involve the teas themselves, and the growing education and awareness of the American tea-drinking public. "This technology will open up the marketplace, much like the coffee market, as people learn what really good tea is," says Paulose. Schnell points to the timing of growing interest in organic products as a future growth area: "We see a huge trend toward organic tea bags in the future as people are becoming more conscious of what they are putting into their bodies." Shinner agrees: "With all the studies coming out about the values of antioxidants, there's a trend towards quality and towards health. Whole-leaf teas contain more antioxidant properties than dust or particles. Therefore, with full-leaf teas in pouches, there are more healthful benefits," he says.
   Another open question is whether these specialty tea bags will be able to win over true connoisseurs with their tea quality, or suffer from guilt by association with the traditional bags. While the sow's ear may have become a silk purse for some companies, others are not convinced. Bill Waddington of St. Paul, Minn.-based TeaSource, says flatly that "new tea bags are almost all hype." In Waddington's view, "People are losing sight of an incredibly important axiom: the quality of tea is the most important factor in the flavor of the cup. While some of these new bags offer the possibility of putting a larger leaf in a bag, most companies I have seen are not putting any better quality tea in the bag. They are just using it as a promotional gimmick."
   Tea bags are also provoking more philosophical reservations. The Australian thinker, Marcus Bussey, sees tea bags as a metaphor-albeit a fractured one-for the industrialization of culture. Writing for the futures studies Web site, www.metafuture.org, Bussey laments, "We have traded things of universal value-time, tradition, relationship, reflective space-for an artifact that is ephemeral and disposable." While even critics like Waddington grant that "these new tea bags may well bring some new people into the world of premium tea, simply because marketing and promotion can work," Bussey sees a dead-end. If making and drinking tea becomes more fixated on convenience than on the quality of the experience, why not just drink coffee-and instant coffee at that?
   The debate is unlikely to end soon. In the meantime, new bags will continue to walk the line between two worlds. Pratt feels it's with the small companies that the hope for the specialty tea market lies. "The tea trade became one of the first victims of the corporate 'the hell with quality, it's money that counts' mentality," he says. "We're beginning to see a turnaround now, and we're starting to see examples of tea in tea bags that is not a disgrace. Well, my God! If we can get real tea in tea bags, that's something new, isn't it?"