One day, co-owner Peter Hackett's pregnant wife had a craving for Mexican food.
So Peter dutifully complied, coming back with the food along with a Mexican iced-tea drink known as agua de Jamaica, which is made from hibiscus flowers and has a berrylike flavor.
"I got back home. I was drinking the stuff. It was amazing," said Hackett, a 33-year-old former real estate agent-turned-entrepreneur, and that sparked the couple's business venture three years ago.
At the time, Hackett was no longer working in real estate and looking for a new way to make a living.
So he and Nicole, a teacher at College Park High School in Pleasant Hill, began brewing test batches of what would become their Jamaica Tea beverage in the kitchen of their Pittsburg home.
Then they started making the product at night in a commercial kitchen in Pittsburg that is operated by All Star Tamales during the day. Soon they were selling in local stores and at the San Ramon farmers markets.
"It just started selling like wildfire," he said.
The tea was popular, but customers had trouble with the name. "(People) would keep coming back and ask for Jamaica tea, but they would mispronounce it," said Peter Hackett, referring to not using the Spanish pronunciation that treats the "j" as an "h."
So he and his wife pronounce the name of the company like the Caribbean island.
The company's products now also include another iced-tea beverage and three iced coffees. They retail from $2.50 to $3 per 16-ounce plastic bottle.
By 2009, the beverages could be found in four Whole Foods markets, a number that has since increased to more than 30 in the Bay Area.
Peet's and Numi's, two other East Bay-based companies, have also gotten into the bottled iced-tea business with various flavored offerings that launched a couple years ago.
Refrigerated iced tea is growing in popularity, according to an industry report released in May 2010 by Mintel, a Chicago-based market research firm.
Sales of refrigerated iced tea in the United States increased 98 percent to $325 million from 2004 to 2009, the report said. The report measures sales at food, drug and discount retailers, with the exception of Walmart stores.
"Fruit juice-based teas are quite popular in the U.S. and hibiscus is new. We know it's very popular in Mexico," said Garima Goel Lal, a beverage analyst at Mintel who edited the report.
The fact that the Hacketts have been able to get their products into Whole Foods stores is definitely a plus, she said.
"If you look at their demographics, they tend to be a high-income group," she said.
But the $2.50 to $3 price tag that Jamaica Tea products are selling for is pretty steep, she said. Honest Tea, a popular bottled tea infused with various fruit flavors, typically sells for $1.99 per 16-ounce container in stores, she said.
Still, given that Jamaica Tea is launching its products in the Bay Area, where consumers like to try new things and Latinos make up a substantial part of the population, sales of the company's hibiscus tea product could catch on, she said.
"Distribution is going to be limited as opposed to (nonrefrigerated) canned and bottled tea, which is shelf stable. So refrigerated teas, especially with some small suppliers, tend to do better with regional distribution as opposed to national distribution," Lal said.
No comments:
Post a Comment