Lifestyle - Tea board brews makeover for Chai

Indian chai is brewing hot with big bang activity lined up over the next few months to promote the beverage among tourists and youths.

The original Piyo More Chai campaign has come a long way and the Tea Board is now planning to position tea and health? in a major way. A second round of iced tea campaign will be unfolded with recipes, while strong internet marketing will be targeted at tourist destinations.
Basudeb Banerjee, chairman, Tea Board, told DNA Money, We’ve gone through the basic Piyo More Chai campaign to the latest Chai Piyo Mast Jiyo campaign. Now, the way forward would be to showcase tea and health through commercials. We are working on it and plan to go ahead sometime in December.
Iced tea was a summer campaign and proved to be very successful. Now, we plan to go extend this in a second phase, showcasing iced tea and its various recipes.
Out-of-home consumption of tea has increased manifold and many tea corporates are planning tea retail outlets to lure the young crowd taking to competing beverages like coffee.
The Tea Board is also looking at tapping destinations like Rajasthan, which are frequented by foreign tourists, to market the Indian brew. This could be direct or through internet and intranet advertising at hotel chains.
The Indian tea industry is seeing better times with most of the producers being able to fetch better prices in recent months. According to industry officials, the image of Indian tea is very important and efforts are being made to ensure the quality of teas available both in the domestic and export market.
The Tea Board, as part of its efforts to step up tea drinking, has initiated the idea a chain of boutiques on the basis of public-private participation across a few metros. Tea corporates like Tata Tea, Wagh Bakri and HUL apart from some local groups are beginning to realise that there is an urgent need to step up out of home tea consumption over the years.
Tea drinking has to be made attractive and we thought there was perhaps some need to give some effort on building new outlets. These will be specifically branded in due course,Banerjee said.