Tea leaves Britons cold

Tea and Britain are an "ingrained" pairing, like "Shakespeare and sonnets" or "the late Queen and corgis", wrote Hannah Twiggs in The Independent.

For centuries, the brew has been "Britain's greatest leveller". "Whether it's a builder's brew in a chipped mug or something posher served in fine china", a cup of tea is "ritual and identity all in one". But perhaps not for much longer: trouble is brewing.

'Love affair showing cracks'

Typhoo Tea, a "stalwart of kitchen cupboards since 1903", is reportedly "teetering on the brink of administration". It's hardly a surprise, said Twiggs: "Typhoo has been running on fumes for years, hit by dwindling sales, supermarket competition and, perhaps most dramatically, a £24m blow when trespassers ransacked its Merseyside factory in 2023". But it's a key sign that Britain's "love affair with tea, once fervent and unquestioned, is showing cracks".

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Sales of everyday black tea, such as PG Tips and Yorkshire tea, are falling. Recent figures show that sales dropped 6% in 2022 to £341 million, meaning black-tea sales "fell behind sales of speciality teas, such as ginger, peppermint and camomile for the first time", said The Times.

In fact, tea has been knocked off the top spot as the nation's favourite drink – by another British staple: the gin and tonic. In a recent Mintel survey of more than 2,000 Brits, "44% said they would opt for G&T when meeting friends, whereas 41% would prefer a cuppa". The remaining 15% "were crippled by the enormity of the question and unable to choose".

'Turning our heads towards coffee'

Perhaps we are falling out of love with the cuppa because "like haircuts, petrol and Freddos, tea is getting more expensive", said Nell Frizzell on the i news site.

The average price for a pack of 80 teabags has gone up by 11% in just one year, according to the Office for National Statistics: up to £2.64 from £2.37. And the reason tea is becoming more costly is a grim one: "we, as a planet, are careering into ecological collapse", said Frizell. Tea-growing regions in East Africa, Southeast Asia and India are being "hit by flooding, heatwaves" and other extreme weather, "all of which have devastating effects on tea plantations".

But we've also been losing interest "in our so-called national drink" for some time. "We are now drinking about a quarter as much tea as we did in the 1970s", partly due to US and European culture "turning our heads towards coffee". That's unlikely to do much good for the environment either, by the way: coffee has "a much higher carbon footprint than tea".

In truth, the seeds of tea's decline were probably sown "several generations ago", said Howard Chua-Eoan for Bloomberg. During the Second World War, tea was rationed but "the government got the cheapest available and distributed it in an egalitarian manner". So, "a social ceiling for the price of tea" was set and, even after rationing ended, Britons "weren’t prepared to pay for pricier but better tea". Coffee may one day "lose its edge", and "a younger generation" could become "obsessed with tea connoisseurship – and the charm of that old crockery". But, said Chua-Eoan, "Don't lose any sleep over it."