By Somnath Saha

We have recently been named National Champion for the UK in the European Business Awards, Europe’s largest business competition. Typhoo deserves to win The European Business Award for innovation because we’ve demonstrated innovation in a number of ways. Please vote for us on http://www.businessawardseurope.com/vote/detail-new/united-kingdom/21680 and ensure you click on the email verification link.

In Britain, 165 million cups of tea are drunk every day. And here at Typhoo, we’re responsible for a lot of that. Over 125 million tea bags leave our factories every week, which make us Britain’s second largest tea producer. We’ve been producing tea since 1903, and to build on our success, we’ve placed strong emphasis on innovation.

Firstly, we’ve grown our private-label business by 28% since 2014. We now supply the unique fuso/pyramid tea bag to three of the four major retailers in the UK. In addition, we’ve introduced some genuinely innovative product lines. Heath & Heather is the number one brand in the health sector. With the fruit & herb and green tea markets growing by over 5% every year, and in order to capitalise on the growing demand for organic products, we’ve redesigned the brand to place greater emphasis on organic ingredients.

Our instant tea, Lift, has been a category leader since the 1970s and with the rising trend for green teas, we made our Lift Matcha Instant Green Tea available in an “on-the-go” sachet format. There’s growing demand for matcha tea and we’re currently the only ones offering the instant version at an affordable price point.

It is this product innovation that has helped us earn the Great Taste Awards every year for the past 5 years. And we’ve been recognized as a Great Taste producer.

We spent £2 million in the last two years redesigning our factory, which has not only enabled us to produce more tea so that we can add new customers to our client list, but also to be flexible as to how we supply our tea to clients, producing square tea bags, loose-leaf tea in fuso tea bags for added flavor and aroma as well as tea packed in envelopes.

I’m going to take an educated guess: that not long ago you drank a cup of Typhoo tea. You might even have a pack of Typhoo tea in your cupboard right now, as your parents and grandparents would have done in the past. Our tea has sustained people for well over a century.

So this award would be for you, the consumer – and it, of course, would be for all of us, for all the hard work that we have put in over 113 years making the tea you love.

Somnath Saha is CEO, Typhoo Tea