Cotterley

Cotterley is not a tea brand in the marketing sense at all. It is the in-house tea label of Intermarche, France's third-largest supermarket group, where it sits as the everyday own-label competing with Carrefour and Casino on price. That means it is held to the discipline of a major national grocer's private brand: blended to a fixed specification, costed tightly, and judged purely on whether shoppers come back. There is no founder myth and that is the point.

The range is the practical French everyday spread, green tea with mint in the North African style, lemon, fruit infusions and a straightforward breakfast black, pitched as affordable daily tea. What makes it worth importing is the detail under the low price: FSC cartons, and the tidy, repeatable blending of a brand that has to satisfy a demanding domestic grocery audience. For our shelf Cotterley is the under-the-radar pick we recommend most to value-conscious tea drinkers. It is noticeably better than most UK supermarket own-label at a comparable price, the mint green in particular is a genuinely good everyday cup that costs very little, and the environmental basics are covered rather than ignored. For a customer who assumes cheap tea has to mean nasty tea, it is the single easiest counter-example we can hand them, and it tends to convert them on the first box.

Key facts