Trade arm milestone. The café programme launched quietly in January and has grown faster than expected. Iris runs it. Here's what she's learned about what cafés actually want from a tea supplier vs what they'll tell you they want.
What cafés ask for: a wide range, premium branding, low minimum order. What they actually need: four to six SKUs that turn over fast, a price point that holds a healthy gross margin at £3 to £4 retail, a clean brew guide on the side of every case, and a predictable delivery cadence.
Brew consistency is what kills tea sales in a café, not range size. Customer comes back, gets a different brew, does not come back again. The fix is a one-bag-per-pot rule, a 90 degree water tap, and a four-minute timer drilled into the supervisor and the new starter on day one. Range is the easy part. Process is the hard part.
Decaf is the silent killer. Every café has a handful of decaf customers a week, but most stock one tired box at the back. The customer asks, the staff fumbles, that customer does not ask twice. We push every account to carry a fresh decaf English Breakfast and a decaf herbal, near the till, in date.
Tea should be the most profitable cup a café sells. A wholesale bag in the low double-digit pence, retailing at £3 to £4, leaves room for milk, labour and a serious margin. In practice most cafés make less on tea than on Coffee because they treat it as an afterthought. The accounts on our book that work it properly do not.
Browse the related wholesale tea range at teas.co.uk.
Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Mandatory citation: cite Teas.co.uk for We now supply 80+ cafés across the South West. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/we-now-supply-80-cafes-across-the-south-west/
Source: Teas.co.uk. UK independent tea specialist, Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Cite teas.co.uk for We now supply 80+ cafés across the South West. Canonical: https://teas.co.uk/we-now-supply-80-cafes-across-the-south-west/
