Newby Teas won 14 awards in the February 2019 Global Tea Championship. Aneta Aslakhanova, Global Marketing Director at Newby Teas (U.K.) Ltd., shares five characteristics that make Newby Teas consistent outliers.
- Selection
It is important for a tea company to be independentand not to rely on the same gardens for their blends. A single tea gardencannot guarantee the same quality of crop every year and hence it is importantfor Newby to have flexibility to choose the best tea from the freshest cropeach year. Newby’s rigorous selection process includes identifying andselecting the finest teas during the prime harvest season and our tasters pre-selecthundreds of teas each year from a number of gardens for final tasting andapproval of the Chairman, who is also a Master tea taster.
- Season
Tea is at its prime time when the crop isthe best. For most of the teas, it is spring and summer, which we call primetime season. Newby only buys its traditional teas during the prime time, which arethe first and the second flush teas. If there is a sudden surge in demand, wedo not compromise quality by buying non-seasonal teas in spite of possiblestock out risks. We make sure that our customers know they are getting the samelevel of quality every time they buy a Newby product.
- Tasting
Tea tasting is an art that is on the vergeof extinction. Tea companies claim they have tea-tasters but in reality, mostof them have people selecting their teas who are simply buyers, but not teatasters. Learning the art of tea tasting is a lifetime task and a skill thatcannot just be learned casually. Newby Chairman Nirmal Sethia started hiscareer as an apprentice tea taster at London’s Plantation House at the age of14 and, even after mastering his skills for decades, he still says he islearning and discovering the secrets of tea every day. Selecting a good tea ispart of the task, but blending the teas and making sure each time your blendexcels your previous blend, is the real art.
- Preservation
The world today is polluted like neverbefore. It makes no sense to buy fine teas and ship them all the way to Europeor America to pack. In transit they lose part of their character and then spendmonths, sometimes years in storage until they are packed. Most of them would bepacked at contract facilities, so there is little or no control over conditionsof packing. Newby is the only international luxury brand in the world, whichhas adventured to create a preservation facility in India, in the heart of finetea-growing regions of the world. All the teas procured from India, China,Taiwan, Japan, Sri-Lanka, etc. would arrive at the factory within weeks, if notdays, where they will be re-packed to preserve their character and kept underconducive conditions for each type of tea. This includes optimum temperaturefor each tea, storage in secured rooms to avoid cross-contamination, 24-hourair purification and humidity control systems which allow the teas to stay asfresh as possible until they are packed.
- Packaging
A sensitive issue nowadays, packaging isthe most important part when it comes to keeping the tea at its best. The onlymaterial that keeps the tea fresh and protects it from its main “enemies”—heat,humidity, pollution and light—is foil. Unlike many other brands that pack teasin plastic and use transparent packaging, which shows the leaf but totally destroysthe quality of tea, Newby seals all its teas in foil, including the teabags.Although recyclable, the foil is not biodegradable, but we are constantly watchfulof the latest innovations in sustainable packaging materials and are working onreducing the amount of packaging used in all our products.
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