Tea and Restaurants Flourish at NRA Show
With its promises of healthful rejuvenation, invigorating refreshment, focus-inducing properties, and clean sustainable energy boost, tea continues to flourish in the beverage category. Restaurants are reporting confidence and growth as well, ending the first quarter of 2012 with strongest same store sales in the last 4 years.
The symbiosis here can't be denied. The number of tea beverages offered in restaurants grew 11.5% in the few years prior, while vertical integration in tea companies' supply chains as well as innovations in delivery systems, all enable restaurant purveyors to capture their part of this market with greater ease and confidence than ever before.
This weekend's NRA show will undoubtedly be a testament to the opportunities gourmet independent tea companies present to restaurants. As is fitting for its growing significance in the food and beverage landscape, a search of exhibitors reveals no less than 150 vendors related to tea. Two of the handful of awards for food and beverage product innovations were given to tea products this year. Go tea!
As the largest online destination for tea, with hundreds of gourmet teas available for immediate shipment along with an array of unique teaware for preparing, serving, and storing tea in beautiful style, we at Adagio Teas are looking forward to standing out amongst the crowd. Visit us in booth 2042 for a free Guide to Tea book.
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The restaurant industry in the US is comprised of 970,000 restaurant and foodservice outlets and a workforce of nearly 13 million employees. At its largest event of the year, the NRA show is expected to draw 58,000 people to McCormick Place in Chicago this weekend to visit 1,800 exhibitors displaying all manner of “world-class innovations, talent and strategy from across the restaurant industry.”
The industry at large is regaining its healthful vigor, according to the National Restaurant Association’s Restaurant Performance Index (RPI), which declared highest post-recession same store sales this March. Buoyed by improving sales and traffic levels, restaurant operators continued to report solid capital spending activity, according to an NRA press release. “Bolstered by improving sales and traffic results, restaurant operators’ outlook for capital spending reached its highest level in more than four years,”said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the Research and Knowledge Group for the Association. The news and boost in confidence comes at a nice time, for this weekend’s event, don’t you think?
If you escape the show floor this weekend, don't miss Adagio Teas' newest Tea Experience shop downtown on State Street (cross street Orleans) where you may sample any of the nearly 100 teas in the shop. Try a flight, any three you like. Choose distinctly different greens, or a range of teas from a single origin like Taiwan or India.
For more on how we may assist in building a tea program that uniquely fits your needs, please send me a note or visit this weekend in booth 2042.