Marks and Spencer - Tea

This project is supporting a small tea cooperative in Kenya – Iriaini - to blend and create their own tea bags to sell to the UK market and to the internal African market.

The current supply tea chain for the UK market involves importing tea in bulk for blending, packing, marketing and distribution in the UK. Tea is effectively treated as a commodity ingredient, even though most of the processing takes place at source and only the final mixing and packing stages are carried out in the UK. Making direct connections with tea farmers and forming partnerships is not the norm in tea, and is a policy only followed by a small number of packers.

Marks & Spencer have a long-standing policy of engaging with farmers, and if possible wish to move beyond the current commodity-based tea model and towards more sustainable partnerships. This will also bring the tea producer much closer to the UK customer as recommended in the Traidcraft report ‘A Fair Cup’.

Iriaini Tea Factory comes under the umbrella of the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA), but is an independent company collectively owned by local farmers.  They have already had some success with packing for the local market and are very committed to pack for international sales.

M&S have trialled and agreed packaging that will allow packing at the factory using a local printer and packing supplier to create the packaging for the product.  A tea packing line has now been established at Iriaini and M&S has been working with the factory to ensure that appropriate training has been provided and the tea packing room brought up to standard.

From an M&S perspective, the opportunity is to sell a high quality product that is unique in the market and also has a uniquely strong sourcing story. Iriaini has in recent years worked closely with Traidcraft Exchange on extensive climate change adaptation & mitigation work with their farmers and it is evident that they are a commercial innovative organisation.

From the Iriaini perspective, they have the chance to work with M&S, leveraging their technical, product development and commercial skills but also to use the capacity created by this partnership to help them access other markets. This is extremely important - the challenge for any tea packer is to establish a point of difference in the market. Iriaini have already had some success with promoting packed tea locally based on their name quality.

The addition of a packing format unlike any other available in the region (possibly the world) would give them the opportunity to promote their quality proposition and stand out from competitors.

The tea sold will generate an additional $2 -$3 per kilogram due to the fact that most of the value is being added to the product at source rather than in the UK.  This should be around $30,000 for the volume supplied to M&S in year 1. Approximately 8,000 farmers supply Iriaini and all are shareholders in the factory so benefit directly from any additional income via their annual profit share.