The Tea Trove traces its roots back to 1917 when the Kanoi family used to own and manage 42 tea gardens in Assam. We speak to founder Rishav Kanoi on how he plans to tap the current generation of tea lovers with his reinvented variations.

OVER THE years, tea business has grown to be an industry within itself including cultivation, processing, trading and packaging of tea. With every generation in the business for over a century now, the Kanois have developed an expertise in planting the right tea. We speak to the current generation expert Rishav Kanoi on how he has rediscovered a sustainable business venture by working hand-in-hand with the best local, global and food artisans.

Rishav Kanoi reinvented The Tea Trove in 2012 with innovative variations of tea that have mass appeal, especially with the youth. “Since innovation has been our USP, we believe in improving the quality of the tea and the customer experience constantly, and are passionate about product innovations. For example, we give complimentary loose tea filters along with the loose tea so that our customers get the convenience of a tea bag with leaf quality superior teas they purchase at the price point of the tea bags.”

Explaining the varieties on offer, Kanoi said that The Tea Trove sources freshly packed teas (black, white, oolong, and green) directly from the cultivators and blends them into unique and exquisite flavours using organic dried herbs (peppermint, lemon-tulsi, chamomile, lemongrass etc.), organic dried fruits (apple, orange peel, mango, pineapple, etc.), organic dried flowers (rose, lavender, jasmine, etc.), and organic dried spices (cardamom, pepper, cinnamon, etc.). “Our products are handcrafted with all-natural ingredients,” he said.

With 65 varieties of teas and blends in offering, Kanoi is all set to launch Matcha range, which is the super hero amongst teas – 100% green tea leaves from Japan – which he sees as the next big thing in the beverage market.

“With this, we will also open Tea Experience Zones in the supermarkets manned by trained tea evangelist. Apart from the offline stores in New Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Kolkata, we sell through our own e-commerce website along with Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, Big basket and Swiggy,” he said.

The Tea Trove plans to have 25 stores in 6 cities in India by the end of 2018 and achieve great numbers through online sales. “We are also looking forward to market our products via vending machines (aka Any Time Tea Machines, ATT) which will be placed at high footfall locations such as railway stations, market places, residential and business complexes, etc. With the inception of ATTs, we will also enter the hot tea cups segment and expect about 80% of our ATT sales to comprise of these hot cups along with a number of products such as popsicles and iced teas (depending on seasons) in all the cities. However, we do expect packaged teas to keep on continuing to hold up the bulk for our future sales,” informed Kanoi.