the back burner

Egad.

Reading UK's Guardian today led to a startling discovery: "for the first time, annual UK sales of instant coffee have marginally eclipsed those of standard tea." What? How can a mere priod serve this rollicking monster of a statement? Surely they could have used an exclamation mark.

More from the article is below. I must now retire to my work, slowly digesting this news. It's not as though the British cuppa has actually fallen from grace -- drinkers still spend an enormous annual amount on tea -- it's just that one of my favourite stereotypes is suffering a little tarnish. (At the hands of instant coffee, no less.)

(from The Guardian, Simon Bowers reporting:)

Many tea packers privately concede this is just the latest milestone in a slow but resolute decline. Younger drinkers are switching to bottled water, fizzy pop and coffee, and when they do drink tea, they have come to expect to buy teabags at rock-bottom prices.

This month Premier Foods, which owns Typhoo, announced its tea sales in the first six months of the year were down 9%, and said this reflected a similar decline right across the mainstream tea market. Typhoo has quietly been put up for sale. Meanwhile the latest industry figures, also released this month, showed annual retail sales of standard tea (that is, non-premium teas) dropped 5.1% to £439.8m — for the first time falling a shade below those of standard instant coffee, up 4.1% at £439.9m.

Bill Gorman, director of the UK Tea Council, warns against sounding the death knell. Measured by volume, tea's popularity remains unrivalled. It still dominates what the packers refer to as "share of throat", with 165m cups drunk every day in Britain, about double our coffee consumption.

The amount of tea drunk in Britain has been steadily on the wane for decades, with most people in the industry putting the rate of decline at about 2% a year. Mr Gorman insists tea's "share of throat" is not being lost to coffee, despite the rapid proliferation of espresso bars. "There have been two big hits to the tea market," he says. "In the 1970s and 80s we lost out to fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Coca-Cola, then a decade later we started losing sales to bottled water — particularly among women."

Nick Kilby, a director at Tetley, which is owned by the venerable Indian conglomerate Tata, is especially concerned about trends among younger drinkers. "People in their 20s are simply not drinking as much [tea] as older generations were when they were in their 20s. That's when people tend to make their choices — and they stick with them. Over the longer term, it could be quite a big issue." One thing all the packing groups agree on is that tea drinkers tend to fix on a brand and drink it in steadily increasing quantities as they get older.

Posted by nickles at September 27, 2005 02:09 PM | TrackBack