While the entire world has gone through many disruptive changes since covid, the challenges have not relaxed completely yet. The aftermath of covid is now experienced by many across the world in terms of inflation, rising cost of living, food shortages and many. The addition of the Russia – Ukraine conflict has not helped the situation either and has contributed to the downfall further. Along with these complicated changes, the consumer behavior in the tea market too have experienced a shift in behavior.
The tea market is one of the traditional and oldest market that has existed in the world. It is still the second largest in the overall beverage consumption after water. This has not changed and is not expected to change in the foreseeable future. However there have been some notable changes in consumers patterns which are as follows:
With the economy taking a beating, people have cut down on luxury spending as a whole. Similarly in the tea market it is evident that the high end tea brands have experienced a shortfall in consumption with consumers shifting to cheaper alternatives in the tea category. While within the tea market the quantity purchased by consumers have not reduced but the segment within the purchase has experienced a decline. Tea consumption has not reduced since it is already considered an essential in many of the markets as it helps consumers relax and has been habitual over the decades.
Consumption of herbal tea has increased. With covid many of the health benefits of herbal tea were communicated by many leading doctors from around the world. With this, the demand for herbal tea experienced a radical shift and manufacturers catered to this segment aggressively.
More tea companies try to produce by themselves. As many of the older mass scale big manufacturers could not produce to small groups expecting a different kind of blend, some of the small scale manufacturers jumped in on this to gain the maximum possible. The small scale manufacturers produce different blends that caters only to a specific market segement and reap the benefits where large scale producers were unable to come in to play.
As a leading tea bag packaging Company catering to many customers globally, Tecpacking too experienced the above with many customers changing their blends to herbal infused tea and many of the packaging sub-contractors now turning their attention to cater to niche market segments by producing niche blends as explained above. Tecpacking has been collaborating with a plethora of tea brands and have first hand experience in the changing consumer patterns in the tea market.
Thank you
Paul Zhang