Husband-and-Wife Team Steeped in ‘Culinary Creations’ : Tea for Two Entrepreneurs Who Blend Together in a Thriving Business

Jan Burns doesn’t like to admit it, but in an unguarded moment she will confide that she is not a tea lover.

“I’m really not a tea drinker,” she says quietly.

It is a strange confession from Burns, considering the business she and her husband, Howard, launched five years ago: the Eastern Shore Tea Co.

Since that time, the two have turned tea blending into a fine art--in more ways than one.

Although she had no formal business education or training in tea tasting, Jan has developed some unusual, deliciously aromatic teas that are being sold in some 500 specialty stores throughout the country.

‘Culinary Creations’

From its best-selling Spiced Apricot Tea with Cloves to the decaffeinated Pink Lemonade herbal blend to the heavier and brisker Night Owl, Burns calls her brews “culinary creations” that serve as a middle ground between traditional heavy teas and lighter, herbal teas.

As much of an art as Burns’ tea blending is, even more so are the tea packages themselves, designed by Howard, who formerly worked as a full-time book illustrator in New York.

Meticulously hand-packed, each 3-ounce bag of their loose tea sports one of his bright and colorful labels, complete with a matching satin ribbon.

“The graphics are very eye-catching--they are what made us stop and explore the tea,” says Andrew Strauss, co-ordinator of purchasing for the 60-store chain of Barnie’s Coffee & Tea Co. “The look of the product is very nice,” Strauss says.

Although significantly simpler than the bright and busy packages of herbal tea from Celestial Seasonings, they are as effective in attracting a customer’s eye, partly because each flavor of tea has a noticeably different package.

By contrast, Strauss says, he is reviewing the product line of another tea company in which there is no variation in the labels. “The labels are all the same. It won’t sell.”

The size of Eastern Shore Tea is another plus for Strauss: “It’s refreshing to find a cottage industry still in existence in an industry that is known for major companies.”

Compared to the giants of the industry--Lipton, Bigelow, Tetley, Red Rose, Twinings and Nestle among them--the Eastern Tea is indeed a cottage industry.

In fact, its business is conducted in a 25-foot-square renovated two-room carriage house behind their 80-year-old farmhouse on the edge of the village.

As Jan is giving a tour of her business, she points five feet away and says, “Over there is our billing department.” It consists of two typewriters on a long table next to a window. “Here is our packaging,” she adds, pointing to a large dining-room table immediately in front of her. And to her side, she notes without moving from her spot, “is our shipping department.” Tea blending is done in the next room, only three feet away.

Eastern Shore Tea began simply enough when the Burns moved to this town of 319 to escape the rat race of Manhattan.

Initially they bought their house in Church Hill as a weekend and vacation spot but eventually got tired of the weekly commute and decided to move to the Eastern Shore for good.

Before they made the great escape, however, they began looking for different ways to make a livelihood in a small town. That’s when they came up with the idea of creating a special tea for the annual Chestertown (Md.) Tea Party, a May festival that commemorates the town’s 1774 dumping to defy the British.

While Jan, in the interest of authenticity, researched what teas would have been available at the time, Howard drew his first commercial label. The entire investment was $5,000.

But, Jan is quick to add, “No one else could have done it for that, because Howard drew the label.” It would have cost much more if the label had to be designed by an outside firm, she explained.

After the Chestertown festival, things just took off. “We started getting calls, ‘Do you have Earl Grey?’ We said, ‘Sure,’ and called our New York supplier to get 5 pounds of Earl Grey,” Burns recalls. As a result, the Burnses concluded, “Maybe’s there’s a niche here for us.”

So while Howard continued to illustrate books on a free-lance basis in Church Hill, Jan set about creating more tea blends.

A Colonial Blend

One of the earliest was Liberty Tea, a logical consequence of the Chestertown tea, because Burns sought to recreate the substitute a Colonial family would have drunk during the Revolution when no tea was available.

The tea contains only herbs that were around at that time: raspberry leaves, rose hips, peppermint, lemon verbena and/or lemon balm and spearmint.

The first year in business, the Burnses sold what they considered a paltry 300 pounds of tea. Last year they sold close to 4 tons--or nearly 42,000 bags of tea.

“Our goal has been to increase the pleasure of the consumption of tea by offering more to choose from,” Burns says. “Although I do not have the expertise of a lifetime tea fan, you can develop your own palate by tasting and trying.”

“At what they do, they are rather unique,” says Jim Harron, owner of Simpson & Vail Inc., a tea-blending company in its own right that is also the Burnses’ supplier.

“They are the only one that offers to the marketplace some real different blends. They have found a real niche in the marketplace that needs to be filled,” Harron says.

Simpson & Vail supplies Eastern Shore Tea with the basic tea--to which a variety of 23 flavorings may be added. Then, at the Church Hill barn, various spices, herbs and floral petals are added to make Jan’s special blends. Unlike Celestial Seasonings brands, which are primarily herbal, Eastern Shore Tea sells mostly traditional teas, many of which have been enhanced with herbs.

For instance, Just Lemon Tea--what Jan calls “the quintessential lemon tea”--smells like a fresh-cut lemon thanks to four lemon flavors: lemon verbena, lemon balm, lemon grass and lemon peel.

Flavor of Asia

Canton Spice is a lemon blend designed to contain spices traded along the early caravan routes from China to Byzantium--cinnamon, cloves, star anise and ginger.

Chanticleer Tea, designed as a breakfast tea, includes sunflower petals for a fresh and different look, while Berry Jamboree--a mixture of strawberry, blackberry and raspberry tea--contains hibiscus and raspberry leaves.

Eastern Tea is experimenting with several more flavors it hopes to introduce soon: kiwi and watermelon tea, passion fruit tea and tangerine tea.

With the help of five part-time employees, the teas are mixed in large metal trash cans by hand and then carefully weighed and poured into the 3-ounce packages, complete with a reusable cheesecloth tea bag.

Then the packages are hand-tied--a process that is so boring that one employee says the company should have at least 52 employees, one for each week of the year. “One week is about all it takes before you get burnout,” said longtime employee Kathleen Chilton.

The first three years in business were a bit of a struggle, Jan admits. But business finally took off after Jan and Chilton began promoting the product at specialty-food shows.

Since then business has grown to a brisk clip--more than doubling every year. But just how big the business--or the profit--is, Burns declines to say, saying it is not good policy to say what you make.

In growing their business, the Burns have been careful to heed the advice offered by an official of a larger tea company: Don’t grow too fast.

Realizing that many small companies, in their eagerness to grow, have failed because they were unable to finance and manage their expansion, the Burnses have moved slowly.

Keeping It Special

For one thing, they have been careful to limit the stores that sell their tea. “We don’t want to be everywhere, because that would kill us as a niche product. If (we) sell everywhere we can sell, we would no longer be special.” she said.

At the same time, when Eastern Shore Tea got a very big order, the Burnses made sure that the buyer paid part of the bill up front to help defray some of the large costs the Burnses incurred to fill the order.

That’s not to say that all has been easy. Their biggest challenge has been finding suppliers that would willingly serve such a small company--and at reasonable prices. “There are many suppliers who require very large initial purchases,” Howard says.

Then there was what Jan calls “the great vanilla-bean caper.” She ordered 10 pounds of very expensive vanilla beans for her vanilla tea, based on the price in the herb company’s catalogue.

But when the beans were delivered, they were more than twice the price.