Britain: Tea & Twist

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There seems to be a limit to how much tea even an Englishman can drink. Since 1958. per capita consumption of tea in Britain has stuck stubbornly at 10.2 lbs. a year per man, woman and mewling babe. To many a British tea merchant this seems disquieting indeed. But not to London's Brooke Bond & Co., Ltd., which for nearly a decade has been capturing an additional 2% of Britain's total tea sales from its competitors each year. Today, with 33% of the market, Brooke Bond is Britain's—and the world's—largest tea company.

In a land where brewing a cuppa is almost as inflexible a ritual as the opening of Parliament. Brooke Bond is properly attentive to tradition. Its agents regularly attend the tea auctions in London's Mincing Lane and make their bids with time-honored cries of "I want some" and "Am I in it?" But Brooke Bond is also in it with the 20th century. Its tea-drinking chimpanzees are as familiar on British TV as Speedy Alka-Seltzer is in the U.S., and last fall, to win the allegiance of future housewives, the company sponsored a national Twist contest. Between tradition, twisting, and a $3,000,000 advertising budget, Brooke Bond last year earned $14.5 million on sales of $318 million. Family Hallmark. Aggressive salesmanship has been a Brooke Bond hallmark ever since Lancashireborn Arthur Brooke founded the company in 1869. (He added Bond to the firm's name to make it sound more upper class.) Arthur Brooke was one of the first British tea merchants to market a uniform blend of tea and to sell directly to retailers instead of to middlemen. Arthur's son Gerald, who began a 40-year reign as chairman of the company in 1912, made Brooke Bond's red delivery vans so much of a national institution that British toy stores sell miniature copies of them. Gerald also extended Brooke Bond's sources of supply far beyond Mincing Lane by building a 30,000-acre plantation empire in India, Ceylon and Africa.

Current chairman of Brooke Bond is Gerald's son John, now 50, who has expanded his hard-sell heritage. Brooke Bond now sells six brands of tea, which it markets in 80 countries at prices ranging from 42¢ a lb. to $2.24. In India 65 million cups of Brooke Bond tea are downed daily, and in tea-rich Ceylon, housewives increasingly pass up home-grown bulk tea for Brooke Bond "packets." ("This," says Brooke, "is an achievement akin to selling refrigerators to Eskimos.") In Canada its Red Rose brand has pulled abreast of Salada as the national favorite.

That Famous Party. Fervent apostles of loose tea leaves and six-minute brewing, Brooke Bond's bosses are shocked by such U.S. aberrations as bagged, instant and iced tea. Nonetheless, the company is now pushing south from Canada, has begun marketing Red Rose in border areas such as New England, northern New York and the Pacific Northwest. So far, Red Rose's best U.S. market has turned out to be Boston. Says Brooke Bond Sales Director Roy Furber with only a hint of a smile: "I suppose it goes back to that famous tea party."