Steeped in Tea

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To the would-be traveler lugging a shopping basket, a supermarket shelf of tea today is as bewildering (and enticing) as the pages of an adventure travel company catalog. Navigating all the worldly choices, one might arrive at a box of Numi Tea's Rainforest Green, depicting a lush cascade that invites an armchair excursion into an Australian rainforest. Down the aisle, Republic of Tea's tin of rooibos evokes the arid South African bush. Nearby, Stash Tea's Exotica blends beckon 'adventurous sippers' to explore 'the essence of distant places . . . tropical hillsides . . . monsoon-swept plains . . . the foothills of the Himalayas.'

Starbucks seduced coffee drinkers by 'romancing the bean' and creating a lexicon of foreign words that heightened customers' sense of sophistication and transported them to an imagined continental culture. Bottled water gets by on the tap water fear factor and a certain trendy appeal, but also on consumers' attraction to distant mountain springs so pure that they couldn't possibly be chlorinated.

Going further, specialty tea companies market wanderlust, packaging a tantalizing and educational blend of exotic locales and rich cultural traditions. Just as Sri Lankans might drink Coca-Cola and eat McDonald's to taste modernity, Americans sip Ceylon tea to taste the exotic. And specialty tea companies invent blends that deliberately evoke an unlikely-and inauthentic-melding of geographies and cultures to meet consumers' desire to be transported. For example, Mighty Leaf Tea's trademark blend, Green Tea Tropical, includes 'notes that conjure up a sense of escape to a tropical island,' says Mighty Leaf's founder and CEO, Gary Shinner. One small but successful company, Zhena's Gypsy Tea, bases its marketing on the founder's Ukrainian heritage-a heritage that is not known for its tea but that contains just the right dose of exoticism. 'Specialty tea is being driven by consumers' desire to learn more of the world,' says Joe Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the USA.

If a Sumatran latte no longer evokes the mystique it once did before Starbucks saturated the American landscape, the display of Tazo tea-which the company purchased in 1999-featured on the chain's counters might serve to reclaim that aura. Tazo is one of the fastest-growing brands of specialty tea in North America. Its original marketing at Starbucks used images of Sikhs, Chinese, and Britons blissfully sipping cups of Tazo. Indeed, the Tazo brand was conceived as a 'combination of cultures drawn together,' explains Steve Smith, Tazo's founder and vice president of tea. 'Our goal was to have the brand look like it was from there and then, not here and now,' using ambiguous symbology 'to appeal to people who are into discovery.' Never mind the reality of these exotic destinations-you're more likely to sip chai in India on the sidewalk of a filthy street than in monsoon-swept serenity-but marketing isn't about reality, of course, just as an adventure travel catalog listing for 'Seven Days on the Silk Road' says nothing about poverty or, for that matter, diarrhea.

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