The summer of 1878 brought a devastating blight to the coffee crop in Ceylon, and coffee plantations were available at half price. Lipton purchased five plantations and left the managers in charge with funds to rip out the dead coffee trees and plant tea bushes. Now he could manage the entire tea-manufacturing process. Within a few years, Lipton’s Ceylon teas began arriving in London, and, of course, he had a new slogan ready: “Direct from the tea garden to the tea pot.”
Through tea, Lipton’s became a household name and an international commodity. Thomas Lipton’s 300 shops had made him a millionaire, but tea made him a multimillionaire.
After achieving his general trade goals, Lipton turned his attention to tea. Drinking tea was still prohibitively expensive for the average working-class family. After investigating the trade further with tea brokers in London, he decided to do what he had done with meat and produce, that is, cut out the middleman and lower the price to his customers. Within a year, he was selling huge amounts of tea in pound, half-pound, and quarter-pound packets. The blends were made especially for the areas around his shops so that Lipton could advertise “the perfect tea to suit the water of your town.” Lipton’s rule was to abolish “wherever possible, the middleman or intermediary profiteer between the producer and consumer.” To achieve that goal for his tea trade, he needed to control the whole tea-production process. He secretly booked a passage to Australia but disembarked at the island country of Ceylon, home of the British Empire’s newest tea plantations.
Bruce Richardson is coauthor of A Social History of Tea: Tea’s Influence on Commerce, Culture & Community, available from benjaminpress.com or by calling 800-765-2139.
From TeaTime July/August 2014
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