spam and tea

Difficult to estimate but as Unilever - bulk (and ultra efficient) producer of both tea and margarine - has not yet fully embraced the concept, let us say for the moment it is cheaper to exploit the agricultural process route. Margarine making manages to derive a very consistent final product from a very wide range of different raw materials (palm oil, canola oil, coconut oil, even sheep tallow) - doing this by taking the raw material back to its basic units and rebuilding it under well understood and reliably held process condititions. By contrast, an average tea factory even if given a consistent raw material, will produce a very wide range of final products from time to time as the process is poorly controlled or monitored and random and diurnal fluctuations in ambient conditions will have a greater effect on the outcome than the manager will care to admit. Hence he will bulk today's tea with yesterday's, his achieved price at auction will fluctuate widely, and tea packers will blend from 20 or more different origins to achieve their consistent branded product - imagine a margarine packer blending margarines imported from 20 origins or even from two!

A tea factory is now technically possible that will take in green leaf, split it down to its basic chemical components, and rebuild a standard and consistent tea (be it liquid extract, soluble powder, or reconstituted onto a tea leaf, or even onto a cellulose imitation leaf). It may not suit us tea purists but, as the field labor becomes scarce to pluck those 27 billion tea bushes every 10 days, believe me companies like Tata and Lipton will be moving in that direction with the big mechanical harvesters and the stainless steel food engineering.

I would expect not in terms of kW expended per kg of tea - tea manufacture is energy profligate. Currently it takes more energy to make a kg of tea than to make a kg of steel! (source: Asian Institute of Technology - Small and Medium Scale Industries in Asia: Energy & Environment - Tea Sector, 2002). And, to make a tonne of tea in a typical tea factory you need to move 2,000 tonnes of air!! (source: Tea: Cultivation to Consumption, ed. KC Willson & MN Clifford,

No, not yet, though Japanese green tea production is about as automated and process controlled as it gets. Japanese green tea manufacture has developed in technical isolation from the rest of the world and while cross fertilization of ideas is possible actual transfer of machinery has not occurred as their process type is so different from the C19 colonial British style still in use around the rest of the world. One of two examples of physical transfer I have seen have not been successful.

Nigel at Teacraft

Thank, Nigel - I'm glad to hear a legitimate expert say that! As a reasonably educated and experienced scientist, I find that a good quarter of putatively scientific reportage in even respectable papers and magazines is just wrong, and close to half beyond that is so deleted, distorted or generalized as to give a travesty of the cited experts' intentions. In a field as ancient, secretive, mythologized and economically important as tea, the ratios are perhaps worse. Better to brew, drink, enjoy and follow the Buddha's advice to the Kalamas.

-DM