Does Your Tea Need an Expiration Date?
How will you handle sell-by dating, and what systems will you put in place to track and "move" aging products? First, a little background. According to a USDA Fact Sheet, "Except for infant formula and some baby food, product dating is not generally required by Federal regulations... There is no uniform or universally accepted system used for food dating in the United States. Although more than 20 states require dating of some foods, there are areas of the country where much of the food supply has some type of open date and other areas where almost no food is dated."
The Germans, famous and/or notorious for their quality controls on tea, have adopted an industry standard of marking tea "best used before" three years after the date it's packaged. This is startling for several reasons. First, while we know it is relatively common practice in the US to sell teas that are a couple of years old, we at Adagio try to avoid stocking teas past the following year's new harvest. In practice, it's not possible to perfectly predict sales volume, and so any retailer will at times be forced to sell "last year's tea" a couple of months after the new harvest, but we certainly are not selling teas that are years past the latest harvest. Second, you may have caught that the rule was three years after it was packaged. There's no telling how old the tea was when it was packaged. (This is not intended to pick on the Germans. At least they have a standard!)
The simple truth is that tea, properly stored, will never be dangerous for human consumption. Tea doesn't spoil and won't hurt you. Freshness is all about the quality of the taste and aroma. Once a tea is processed and packaged, it slowly loses freshness from day one. Poorly packaged tea (or opened every day or two at home and re-exposed to the air) loses freshness much more quickly. We recommend that customers purchase no more tea than they are likely to consume in six months.
All of this leads to a conundrum. If we don't include a date on our packaging, neither we nor the customer has a reliable way to determine which tea is the oldest or from which harvest. If we do put a packaged-on date, we hold ourselves to a standard of disclosure that few else do and raise questions of freshness that other retailers side-step (and sometimes lie about - "of course that's this year's harvest"). If we put a use-by or best-before date, we would want that to be, at most, a year from packaging. The problem is that even if we perfectly predict demand, we'll have to sell some tea 11 months and 29 days after harvest because the next harvest isn't available yet. Do those teas say "use before tomorrow"? Will the customer buy a tea with a use-by date a couple of months or weeks away, when the competition doesn't even print one?
It is imperative for internal controls that we at least track packaged-on dates. Disclosing information to the consumer is a double-edged sword. We like to be responsible (and appear responsible), but don't want to complicate things unnecessarily and certainly don't want to suggest that the tea is "not good" when it's 18 months old. Consider placing a "Packaged On" date on every package marked for resale. This will allow your staff to enforce a FIFO (first in, first out) method of inventory and give the customer a sense of how old the teas in their cupboard are.
It will be the responsibility of your sales staff to explain the harvest cycles of tea and the fact that while tea is best consumed quickly, it never really goes bad. The good news is that, with our new zip-lock foil packaging, you’ll have a substantial advantage over many other tea retailers. The enemy of tea freshness is light, moisture, and air. A pouch is superior to a tin because it is more air-tight and because it is easy to expel extra air from within the pouch. (A 4-ounce tin with an ounce of tea in it is exposed to three ounces of fresh air every time you open it.)
The Germans, famous and/or notorious for their quality controls on tea, have adopted an industry standard of marking tea "best used before" three years after the date it's packaged. This is startling for several reasons. First, while we know it is relatively common practice in the US to sell teas that are a couple of years old, we at Adagio try to avoid stocking teas past the following year's new harvest. In practice, it's not possible to perfectly predict sales volume, and so any retailer will at times be forced to sell "last year's tea" a couple of months after the new harvest, but we certainly are not selling teas that are years past the latest harvest. Second, you may have caught that the rule was three years after it was packaged. There's no telling how old the tea was when it was packaged. (This is not intended to pick on the Germans. At least they have a standard!)
The simple truth is that tea, properly stored, will never be dangerous for human consumption. Tea doesn't spoil and won't hurt you. Freshness is all about the quality of the taste and aroma. Once a tea is processed and packaged, it slowly loses freshness from day one. Poorly packaged tea (or opened every day or two at home and re-exposed to the air) loses freshness much more quickly. We recommend that customers purchase no more tea than they are likely to consume in six months.
All of this leads to a conundrum. If we don't include a date on our packaging, neither we nor the customer has a reliable way to determine which tea is the oldest or from which harvest. If we do put a packaged-on date, we hold ourselves to a standard of disclosure that few else do and raise questions of freshness that other retailers side-step (and sometimes lie about - "of course that's this year's harvest"). If we put a use-by or best-before date, we would want that to be, at most, a year from packaging. The problem is that even if we perfectly predict demand, we'll have to sell some tea 11 months and 29 days after harvest because the next harvest isn't available yet. Do those teas say "use before tomorrow"? Will the customer buy a tea with a use-by date a couple of months or weeks away, when the competition doesn't even print one?
It is imperative for internal controls that we at least track packaged-on dates. Disclosing information to the consumer is a double-edged sword. We like to be responsible (and appear responsible), but don't want to complicate things unnecessarily and certainly don't want to suggest that the tea is "not good" when it's 18 months old. Consider placing a "Packaged On" date on every package marked for resale. This will allow your staff to enforce a FIFO (first in, first out) method of inventory and give the customer a sense of how old the teas in their cupboard are.
It will be the responsibility of your sales staff to explain the harvest cycles of tea and the fact that while tea is best consumed quickly, it never really goes bad. The good news is that, with our new zip-lock foil packaging, you’ll have a substantial advantage over many other tea retailers. The enemy of tea freshness is light, moisture, and air. A pouch is superior to a tin because it is more air-tight and because it is easy to expel extra air from within the pouch. (A 4-ounce tin with an ounce of tea in it is exposed to three ounces of fresh air every time you open it.)