Brewing a Trendier Cup of Tea

By ESTHER SCHRADER

Aug. 3, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

You knew chai had gone mainstream when the sweetly spicy, milky tea brewed along the sides of dusty Himalayan roads started spilling into the cardboard cups of America.

Today, there are chai Web sites, chai hotlines, chai fan clubs and chai associations. On food market shelves there’s kosher chai, decaffeinated chai, chai concentrate and chai powder. There are chai lattes, chai punch, chai granita style, chai Popsicles and chai ice cream.

It’s all part of chai American-style: convenience tea marketed as chic and squirted into the waiting cups of commuters and moms with jogging strollers.

Fueled by the belief within the coffeehouse industry that the cafe latte craze is petering out, chai has become the latest darling of the people whose business it is to make us buy. U.S. sales of the mix of black tea, cardamom, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, milk and honey have surged from less than $2 million in 1994 to $11 million in 1997, with California leading the way in sales, according to Sage Group, a Seattle market research firm.

That’s a tiny market compared to that for coffee, and it’s likely to stay that way. But it’s big enough to put chai atop the menu boards of neighborhood coffeehouses.

The growth in popularity of the brew is the latest proof of the American rule of thumb: To succeed, take something exotic, pure and discrete and turn it into something deceptively homogeneous.

Much of the American stuff is loaded with sugar and preservatives and bears as much resemblance to the real thing as a Starbucks shop, with its coffee served only in cardboard cups, does to a real Italian espresso bar.

“To me, chai is what I had on the side of the road in Pakistan, steamed up by a monk with buffalo milk,” said Jay Demerath, professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “And somehow I don’t think they’re serving it that way at Starbucks.

“What are they thinking of? Are people really finding in chai something that is distinctive and is communal? Or is it the Pepsi for this generational niche? Have we turned it into something meaningful or taken away the meaning? I suspect the latter.”

What the tea industry is thinking is very simple. In the last two years, it has marketed specialty teas more voraciously than ever before. Tea houses are opening from Los Angeles to Boston. There are specialty tea trade groups, symposia and magazines. Sales of the teas, of which chai is one, grew from $250 million in 1990 to $500 million in 1997.

But even the best tea lacks the magic ingredients that got Americans hooked on lattes a decade ago: lots of hot, steamed milk and add-ons like cinnamon, chocolate and sugar.

Enter chai.

“People are going in record numbers for green tea and organic tea,” said Sage Group President Brian Keating. “Tea fits that 35-plus age group for its presumed health benefits. So the tea industry is thinking, how do we go out and grab the people who think they want healthy but really want taste? It’s an old trick.”

Diedrich, the Orange County coffeehouse chain, introduced its version of chai in June. Starbucks started steaming up chai lattes at its cafes in March, at the same time airing radio ads touting the stuff nationwide. Other coffee bars in California are already selling vanilla chai, green tea chai, chai over ice.

“The reason it’s popular--I’m drinking tea as I speak--is because it has milk in it, and spices; it’s essentially grown-up cocoa,” said Helen Gustafson, tea buyer for the Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse and author of “The Agony of the Leaves: The Ecstasy of My Life With Tea.”

“It’s yummy. It’s like a comfort food. But really it’s part of the whole commodification of spirituality. People don’t have time to pamper themselves, to lose themselves, to meditate. So they say, ‘Just put it in my commuter cup and off I go.’ ”

Traditional Version Altered for Market

Tea purists scoff at the sudden clamor for a version of the brew milked of its tradition. In its Asian birthplace, chai--which means tea in a host of Asian languages--is steeped long, lovingly and dark, in a process that is as much ritual as the tea itself.

“The high one gets from real tea is like really being in love, instead of just a crush,” said Devan Shah, owner of India Tea Importers in Los Angeles, which has long specialized in the real stuff.

“If one is truly, deeply in love, it lasts, it’s pure, it’s holy. Drinking the chai they’re selling these days is different. It’s like having a crush.”

The people marketing the American version of chai say they’d rather sell a facsimile of the brew than no chai at all.

“We sometimes have to streamline things to offer it in our stores. But given the chance to offer it to our customers or not offer it at all, we definitely choose to streamline if we have to,” said Karmen Johnson, spokeswoman for Starbucks Coffee Company, whose “Chai Tea Latte” is made from a concentrate that contains real honey--as well as the preservative potassium sorbate. “That’s the kind of choice we are faced with if we want to offer something different.”

At Starbucks coffeehouses, the concentrate is squirted out of a dispenser into a cardboard cup and mixed with foamed milk.

Even the most voracious marketers of the stuff don’t claim chai will supplant the well-honed American taste for a daily cup of joe. Industry experts estimate that less than 5% of people in the United States have tried chai.

But as the coffeehouse craze born in the late 1980s enters its adolescence, with lattes becoming so ubiquitous that McDonald’s offers them, coffee conglomerates, marketers and merchandisers are pushing hard to sell a taste for whatever will keep the endlessly fickle American consumer coming in.

And with growing numbers of baby boomers a little too old to handle the caffeine in a two-shot espresso, and others looking for something healthier than a whipped cream-topped mochaccino and a scone to start the day, chai is being marketed as the latest healthy soother for lives on the run.

“I get it, like, every day, because if I drink coffee I get totally crazy,” said Kelly Scotten, 20, waiting for her Chai Tea Latte at a Newport Beach Starbucks recently.

Never mind that the average chai contains nearly as much caffeine as an espresso-based latte, or that many of the chai powders and chai concentrates the coffee bars use to steam up the new drink are loaded with as much sugar as 10 ounces of Coca-Cola.

“It’s a tea milkshake. There are places selling a hazelnut chai tea latte, for God’s sake,” said Jon Albers, senior buyer for the hip specialty food chain Trader Joe’s, which sells a chai concentrate in milk carton-like containers. “It’s whatever the market says it is.”

Sales of Specialty Teas Have Tripled

The chai fad is emerging as the coffee business “has sort of plateaued in terms of the cappuccino-latte thing,” said Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Assn. of America.

Sales of gourmet coffee, coffee beans and drinks rose about 5% in 1997, according to Find/SVP Publishing, a New York market research firm, compared with a 500% increase in the beverage’s boom years, from 1983 to 1992.

“When Denny’s finally put the sign up saying they have cappuccino, well, then you knew that was probably the beginning of the end,” Albers said.

In two years, chai has gone from a cottage industry dominated by tiny brewers in Northern California and the hot-drink-vanguard Pacific Northwest to a business of 125 manufacturers projected to do $16 million in sales this year.

Tea giant Celestial Seasonings bought a Colorado chai company called Mountain Chai this spring. It plans to put a microwaveable chai on supermarket shelves by year’s end.

“It’s ironic that it’s being sold in concentrate,” said Ward Barbee, publisher of Fresh Cup magazine, a coffee and tea industry trade journal in Portland, Ore. “The chai connoisseur shudders when he comes into a well-known coffee chain and sees the thing doctored up. Some of it is god-awful, you have to eat a pork chop or a garlic clove to get rid of it; it leaves a bad taste in your mouth for weeks. But purists be damned. It’s going very, very mainstream very fast.”

Oregon Chai, a Portland, Ore., chai company that makes more than one-third of all prepared chai on the market today, was founded by a UC Santa Cruz graduate who teamed up with her mother to start the company in 1994. That year, it did $20,000 in business; by 1997, sales were up to $2.8 million, and are projected to grow to $5.4 million by year’s end.

At Trader Joe’s, sales of tea, chai and other specialty brands have tripled in the past five years, Albers said.

“We’ve stocked it for years, because we’re foodies here, and we liked it, but it used to be I couldn’t do $5,000 a week on it,” he said. Now he sells $50,000 worth a week. “I can’t stock enough of it,” he said.

On a recent morning, Suandra Newberry sat amid the crystals and incense that she sells at Visions & Dreams Emporium, her Costa Mesa spiritual store. She clutched a cardboard cup of chai latte from the local Pain du Monde.

“I did a fast recently, lost my craving for coffee,” Newberry said. “The chai seems to be good for me. It’s not as light as an herbal tea, but it seems to cleanse me.”

Informed that the chai she was drinking was made from a powdered mix manufactured by a company called Big Train and loaded with sugar, nonfat milk powder and nondairy creamer, then mixed with water, Newberry did a double take.

“Well,” she confided, “it tastes good, too.”

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New Twist on Tea

The traditional version of chai is enjoyed by everyone from monks to weary travelers in India, Pakistan and Nepal. At right, sales figures and projections for the U.S. market.

Traditional Style

Ingredients

Black tea leaves

Vanilla

Honey

Milk (from cows, goats or buffalo)

Spices such as ginger, cardamom, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, black pepper

Directions

1. Slowly brew tea leaves and spices with water until deep in color and pungent; brewing at a slow boil usually takes more than an hour.

2. Strain the tea, then cool and combine with milk.

3. Heat mixture and serve.

American Style