Why is Chinese tea innovation difficult?

Our reporter Yuan Guofeng

In March, all kinds of tea began to be sold

"New" tea seeks to break through

In June last year, the "Category Innovation Opportunities Behind the 400 Billion Increment - 2021 China Tea Market Report" released by Reese's Strategic Positioning Consulting pointed out that there are six major category innovation strategic opportunities in the Chinese tea market, and the original leaf tea presents high-end products.

Compared with making high-end raw-leaf tea, new merchants in the market choose to make raw-leaf tea younger, that is, "to make young people fall in love with tea"

Young people like high quality, so most of the teabag brands give up the low-priced broken leaf tea, and use the complete raw leaf tea for processing in the products, using the triangular bag equipment, which is easier to steep than traditional tea, and the product and packaging are also better.

Young people want more convenience.

Multiple factors affect industrial development

A few days ago, the "2022 Spring Tea Consumption Trend Report" released by the Jingdong Consumption and Industrial Development Research Institute shows that the top five tea products with a turnover ratio since March are herbal tea, green tea, Pu'er tea, black tea and oolong tea

A common problem faced by many tea companies is that for new consumer goods, the cost and pressure of the entire industry chain are huge

Another person in the industry believes that the development of the tea industry is constrained by planting, that is, the so-called primary production, which is also constrained by the current conservative tea culture

Urgent need for original and disruptive innovation

Compared with high-end, making Chinese tea younger is obviously more favored by brands and capital, but this also leads to low entry barriers and more and more similar products

In the face of the entry of these new tea brands, the life of cutting-edge teabag tea companies is even more difficult

Some bloggers have sorted the common tea bags on the market by type, but the packaging style, raw materials, and product names of these products make people "silly and confused", and the phenomenon of homogeneity is serious

As a tea culture with a thousand-year history in China, it has precipitated the emotional attribution of the Chinese people and rich cultural connotations

Zheng Xin, vice president of Guangdong Chali Group Co.

　　According to the data released by Rees Strategic Positioning Consulting, the growth rate of raw leaf tea in the past five years has been 8.

　　"It is worth noting that some of the current innovations are only shallow-level innovations such as packaging and circulation.

　　"China Food News" (April 07, 2022 Edition 07)

　　(Editor-in-charge: Yuan Guofeng)