The Journey of Chai: From India to the US Market
Unit 6: I = Interviewer, Ah = Amanda Hamilton
Understanding Chai and Its Origins
I: Now, just explain exactly what chai is and how you came about it.
AH: Chai, um, is actually a generic word for ‘tea’, and in India, chai has been drunk for centuries in the same way that we would drink a normal cup of tea. It’s a blend of spices mixed with milk, sugar, and black tea. In India, it’s traditionally boiled on the side of, um, train stations in huge woks where they’ve freshly boiled the ingredients and offer chai to thirsty commuters coming into the train station.
In America, as they do, they’ve westernized the chai recipe and created many chai latte flavors, ready-to-drink chai options, um, and you can get chai in most groceries, delis, and cafés in the US. The reason I’m mentioning the US is because that’s where I discovered chai, not in India. I should probably go back a step in that I actually had created mobile tea bars, um, at train stations in the south-east.
Creating Upmarket Tea Bars
The idea was to create upmarket tea bars where commuters could have coffee but have a nice range of maybe fruit teas, herbal teas, and this chai was the perfect addition to our diverse menu. We researched the market a lot and found very, very few people selling it in this country, um, but the only people that were were importing it from America. The problem was, it cost a fortune to import, and the supply chain kept breaking down, so customers would, you know, get very annoyed with us.
Developing My Own Chai
So really, the decision to try and create my own chai was born out of just supplying my own tea bars, not really anything wider than that. I should say it took a year in development. Some of the early recipes were horrible, you know, and the beauty of having the tea bars was that you had a mini market-testing tool. I could take the recipes straight to the tea bars and let the customers decide because they’re the most important people.
Customer Feedback and Market Testing
We reached the point where the customers either couldn’t tell the difference between mine and the US version, or they preferred it, and that was good enough for me. We stopped the US supply, and I started solely supplying my own tea bars. If I was producing chai for my customers and they were enjoying it, why could that not be expanded on a global scale, um, possibly selling to other café bars or even retail in supermarkets?
Approaching Supermarkets
So I decided to, um, just approach supermarkets and see what they thought. I sent in samples to, er, Tesco, really not expecting much back, and, um, got a call back to say that they absolutely loved the samples and would be interested in meeting me. Last summer, we went in to have a meeting with the buyer and pitched, you know, my research in the US and how I thought it would be placed in the UK. He offered, um, 230 stores nationwide straight away, at which point my mouth dropped rather like yours is now.
That was a massive turning point, obviously, because at that point I had to get a brand and packaging really quickly in about six weeks, and I didn’t have a designer. It was all just full-on for that period of time.