Tea

I just got back from a pretty cool conference this last week that I was invited to by the department. For the business department we went on a sponsored trip to a conference on tea. I know that it may not sound like the most intriguing way to spend four days of your life, but if you got credit for doing it, wouldn't you? So basically it was this big gathering of wholesale tea manufacturers that are trying to sell their brands to various small and large stores. We decided that as a group we would say that we were opening a small shop in town here and we would need a large foodservice tea provider. I have never spent more time talking about herbal tea in my life. I mean before this week I didn't even know what oolong tea was and now I swear I am addicted to green tea. We got to try all of the newest tea brands and see all of the cool new packaging. I was really surprised at how big they all said the market actually is, and at how fast they all said it is growing. There must have been a total of about a hundred different foodservice iced tea wholesalers there and each one had a whole different campaign or slogan or angle from which they were selling basically the same thing. Some were extremely high scale teas that we couldn't even talk to beyond the taste test and introductions because they only really sold to high scale restaurants and big specialty stores. It was really fun playing the character game because we even got so far as to say we would contact many of them about a foodservice ice tea sale when we got the business to the final stages of construction. What I have taken out of it is not only a full blown tea addiction, but also another perspective on business that I hadn't really thought of. I think this conference really showed me that there are so many people in this world with a huge range of interests they are willing to pay for and that no market is unworthy of attention until it's been properly researched.