Sarah Trench at TeaChoice by Adagio Teas

Pyramid shaped teabags allow you to serve our gourmet whole leaf teas in the most functionally convenient format available. No teapots needed. No measuring or cleanup involved. Simply add hot water and enjoy. 50ct foodservice quantities now available, no strings [or tags] attached. Relabel with your shop or brand name, or proudly serve with ours.

You want to start a tea program. You're thinking loose tea, you want to do a nice job, need to know how to serve loose in-house, how to repack for your own wholesale customers, and how to serve to-go. I have versions of this conversation with many of you, so thought I'd spell out some thoughts and steps here. You might be serving X brand of tea now, but want to step it up. Or you've been focused on coffee and tea is new to you. Either way, you've come to the right place.

To those of us in the know, the rising crest of tea's popularity wave is no surprise, we've been watching the swell for years. Restaurants are both aiding and benefiting from the frenzy. Our largest beverage behemoth, Coca-Cola, reported that across all foodservice outlets tea sales were up a glaring 17 percent in 2010 alone. Mintel Menu Insights recently forecasted a 53 percent increase in iced tea beverages from 2008 to 2013. What soda wouldn't do for those numbers...

After 12 great years of studying and serving and selling tea to hundreds of thousands of customers, nearly every manner of tea and teaware has come through our doors. Unedited online reviews of every product we sell offer us the advantage of a continual positive feedback loop of testing and evaluating and learning customer preferences. This fuels our evolution. We are excited to announce a range of new items: new teaware for steeping and serving, line extensions of our popular overwrapped teas, as well as new forms of discounted bulk packaging. We can't wait to hear how these benefit you and your tea program. We aim to please!

If you're new to the world of tea, figuring out what you need to have a successful program can be daunting. How many teas should you carry? Do you want the most popular ones, or more interesting blends that could be unique to your business? What will you store them in? How will you serve them? Will guest be staying and enjoying tea in house, or will they mostly take it to go? Here is a quick guide to help you navigate. We have everything you need, right here, to get started while sparing you the steep learning curve. We love tea, and know it can bring you revenue, satisfied customers, and a unique edge to your business.

While Long Island Iced Tea might win a popularity contest for cocktails related to tea, this one has no actual tea in it at all. It mostly gets its flavor from sour mix and a splash of Coke, to deceptively hide the 5 or so alcohols mixed in. Real tea, however, (actual tea, Camellia sinensis) successfully lends itself to a host of other interesting alcoholic beverages. Beer with Tea, Champagne with Tea, Mar-tea-nis, and even tea liqueurs have all been explored. Some familiar ones here, and some some I've experimented with over the years.

It is a personal mission of mine to woo your inner tea drinker. If you drink more and better tea, there will be more of it available, in more places, at better prices. The biggest obstacle is this: what passes for "tea" in this country is detestable. Most places serve lousy, unpalatable, stale, bitter, flavorless, or otherwise awful stuff and call it tea, and people think this is all there is. At restaurants, on airplanes, in hotels, the story is the same. How can something so ubiquitous be so unacceptably mediocre?

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 teabags and delivery systems, all enable restaurant purveyors to capture their part of this market with greater ease and confidence than ever before.

Who knew that tea would be so popular at a coffee show? An estimated 10,000 people turned out for SCAA's Exposition this year and peppered Portland with coffee and tea aficionados, growers, roasters, blenders, teasmiths, and eager consumers. Coffee and beer flow plentifully in Portland, though the town may be more iconically known for its role in the US tea market. Among others, Tazo, Stash, Oregon Chai, Tao of Tea and more recently, Steven Smith Teamaker all had beginnings here.

Maybe you're a oenophile, or a Q grader and an expert in your field, but you have customers expecting you to know as much about tea as you do about your other beverage passions. Here are a few quick tea facts to put you ahead of the tea curve, and a resource for a full scale (free!) tea education. Use it to train your staff, or your customers!

There are a million articles out there about iced tea. This one has simplicity in mind, since cabin fever barely had a chance to set in before Spring sprung and back out onto sunny patios we gleefully go.

Let's tackle just a few points here:

Adagio will be making appearances at these upcoming events, starting with the SCAA Exposition in Portland this week. Hope to see you at one or all of them!

Tea is the most popular beverage worldwide behind only water but in the US ranks behind a handful of other beverages with soda in the lead, leaving room for huge growth here. As studies and concerns mount against the fizzy behemoth, tea and its purveyors are poised to win big.

A little bit of tea knowledge could go a long way towards boosting sales. In this, the Year of the Dragon, success for new endeavors is all but guaranteed, according to Chinese astrologists. Here are some basic tips to kickstart your tea program. The stars are aligned, and we're here to support you, so start steeping!

At the recent World Tea East show in Philly Bunn was exhibiting its newest device, the Trifecta, as a method for brewing tea. "Unlock the Nuances," they said. They prepared some impressive samples, and we bit. Adagio's third Tea Experience retail shop recently opened on State Street in Chicago, and is featuring this flashy new toy as one method of preparing our favorite beverage.

Fall is the time when tea's myriad of colors seem most at home in the world, like a windy woodsy New England road, vibrant in its Technicolor glory. Whether fall means back to school, the start of football season, or just time to prep for the holidays and colder months ahead, for us in the tea world, fall is the season we look forward to most. Tea sales climb as customers take renewed interest in our favorite beverage. Here are some recommendations for your menu this fall to dazzle and delight.

We the people are infused with caffeine. In the US, 90% of adults reportedly consume some form of caffeine on a daily basis, making it the most socially accepted drug on the market. But as with many things, moderation is key. If you are serving or selling tea to your customers, here are a couple pointers to boost your caffeine IQ and keep your customers within their socially accepted limits.

The East Coast is getting a whole lotta tea love this month. Two major events are on the books to get your tea program ready for prime time. The Natural Products Expo East returns to Baltimore's Inner Harbor after a few years in Boston, September 21-24. World Tea East invites you to "Discover your special tea" in Philadelphia this weekend, September 9-10. If seeing, tasting, sniffing, learning, and talking tea is your bag, head to one of these events to get your fix, and then some.

Making tea is a simple equation. Leaves, hot water, a few minutes, voila. And while better leaves generally brew better tea, water temperature and quality are often overlooked, but critical factors, for producing best possible results. A few equipment manufacturers are innovating in this field and making the increasingly popular beverage even easier to enjoy, and profit from.

Sales of the US non-alcoholic beverage industry grew 1.2% last year, showing a reversal of back to back years of decline. Fueling this is the thriving tea and ready-to-drink bottled tea market; tea sales in the US could approach $15 billion in 2012, up from $8.5 billion (foodservice share $2.8 billion) in 2009.

If you've missed out on the first 3000 years of tea history, it's not too late to start steeping. Tea's popularity is at an all time high as modern science continues to confirm centuries of age-old wisdom. With half of the US food dollar spent out of the home, tea of all types offers enormous opportunity for the world of foodservice.