April 30, 2014
WASHINGTON: If Parvati and Rajesh Hegde could read the tea leaves when Oprah Winfrey visited their hovel in India in 2012, they might have insisted on a trademark contract. Or maybe not.
On Tuesday, Starbucks launched "Oprah Chai Tea" across America.
April 30, 2014
WASHINGTON: If Parvati and Rajesh Hegde could read the tea leaves when Oprah Winfrey visited their hovel in India in 2012, they might have insisted on a trademark contract. Or maybe not.
On Tuesday, Starbucks launched "Oprah Chai Tea" across America.
The big-hearted Mumbai slum-dweller couple served the American media mogul home-made masala chai, laced with Indian spices. It provided the TV superstar the inspiration, if not the formula, to launch yet another product that will mint millions. Oprah herself acknowledged the origins of her chai in a promotional video on her website soon after her India visit.
On Tuesday, Starbucks launched "Oprah Chai Tea" across America, with nary a mention of the Hegdes or its Indian origin, saying it was "personally developed by Oprah Winfrey in close collaboration with Teavana's leading teaologist." Teavana is an Atlanta-based tea retailer that Seattle-based Starbucks acquired in 2012 for $ 620 million.
"Oprah's personal tea passion and the deep expertise of Teavana have resulted in a distinctive blend featuring a bold infusion of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and cloves, blended with loose-leaf black tea and rooibos," the company said in a statement.
Not that Parvati and her husband will be particularly perturbed about the lack of acknowledgment, forget the lolly. "If someone comes to our house and drinks tea, we'll be very happy," the domestic worker tells journalists who track her down to the South Mumbai slum. "Our house isn't big, it's small, but we make it from the heart."
Starbucks, which recently entered India in a joint venture with the Tatas, hopes to do for tea — which is the world's second most popular beverage after water — what it did with coffee in America. Although per capita consumption of tea is growing, it is less than a third that of coffee, and that too without the wide array of spin-offs that have been confected from coffee. Tea accounts for less than ten per cent of Starbucks' US sales.
Last year the 19,000-outlet cafe giant acquired Teavana, a chain of mall stores that sell tea and teaware, hoping to expand it to 1000 stores in the next decade and milk more from tea. And Oprah Chai is one of their opening shots.
"This is a momentous day for Starbucks and Teavana collectively, and we are honored to share Teavana Oprah Chai with our customers," said Howard Schultz, Starbucks' chairman, president and chief executive officer. "This distinctive and remarkable tea developed personally by Oprah Winfrey will help introduce even more customers to the ritual and comfort of a great cup of tea."
Whether Americans will take to it as easily as they have embraced coffee is hard to say (54 per cent of Americans over 18 drink coffee every day, spending $ 164 per year). But it provides the Indian tea industry a small opening to ply its produce, something that "India has been trying to do ever since the Boston Tea Party," jokes Philip Lutgendorf, a University of Iowa scholar who has written extensively on India's chai culture.
According to Lutgendorf, most of the chai in the US doesn't taste anything like the chai you get in India; Chai in America, he says, tastes like pumpkin pie — it's very heavy on cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg — and lacks the "kadak" sting that Indian chai has.
Will Oprah chai make the cut? Perhaps the Hegdes can answer that — if they ever get around to tasting it.
Courtesy: TNN
