HERBAL teas ready to be brewed straight out of a box in tea bags is a phenomenon Jamaicans have got used to chiefly in the last decade as much as bottled water in the last 20 years. Before, brewing what Jamaicans call “bush tea” would be done with freshly picked herbs, but the dried variety displayed daily on supermarket shelves with various brand names, owe much of their success in Jamaica to one company, Jamaican Teas. Here is the story behind a brand which spawned many others with great success.
John Mahfood, the group CEO of Jamaican Teas, in his usually accommodative way, was welcoming when this reporter told him that the story of his company is one I want to tell. Mahfood, for the most part, needs little invitation to tell the story.
“It started in 1967, with a company called Tetley Tea,” Mahfood recounts as he went beyond the genesis of Jamaican Teas to the start of the company that would eventually become his own. Tetley Tea is a company that was started in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom in 1837, when brothers, Joseph and Edward Tetley started a company to sell salt and added tea to the mix a few years after. They introduced tea bags to Britain in 1953 after seeing it in the United States in 1939. The concept of tea bags was, however, itself an accidental discovery in 1909 when a New York merchant called Thomas Sullivan sent out samples of tea in small silken bags. Some customers put the whole bag in the pot to brew the tea — and it worked.
A decade later in the 1960s when the Jamaican Government was encouraging foreign companies to set up manufacturing businesses in Jamaica, Tetley Tea was one of the companies which took up the offer, especially given that the incentives to set up locally included “allowing them to have, basically a monopoly,” according to Mahfood.
“If you had set up a factory in Jamaica in the 60s, nobody could import that item into Jamaica.” That Mahfood argued was the genesis not only of Tetley in Jamaica, but also of many other manufacturing companies such as Goodyear, Nestle, Carreras, Gillette, Ricketts and Coleman, etc.
“Hundreds of companies were started at that time and it grew to the point where manufacturing in Jamaica was a very big part of our GDP (gross domestic product), 20 per cent, it had reached at one time,” the Jamaican Teas CEO continued.
Mahfood said these companies flourished until the late 80s into the early 90s when “the Government was forced to change that regime by international lending agenices to open the economy up to competition. And that created a disaster, because the decision to do that was an overnight decision. The manufacturing companies in Jamaica were not prepared for international competition and neither were they exporting. They only supplied their goods to the local market and as a result of that, they were not efficient, they were charging too much and making good profit, so they did not have that incentive to export. And so when all of these companies faced international competition overnight, they mostly went by the wayside,” he recalled.
During that period, very few companies survived. Tetley, which dominated the tea market in Jamaica at that time, was one of those which were badly impacted.
“In 1996, my father and I had the opportunity to buy the company and at that time it was very small. It had one tea packing machine and it was faced with international competition and so on. However, my vision was that, we would launch a new line of teas that were herbal teas based on the ‘bush tea’ on which Jamaicans grew up. So we launched our peppermint and ginger and cerassie and bissy and all of those teas we launched them in a tea bag and that had not happened before anywhere.” Jamaican Teas markets its products under the Caribbean Dreams label.
“The other thing we said we would do is to focus on exporting. At first it was difficult to introduce people to these teas, because number one, they weren’t accustomed to buying them in a supermarket, and number two, there is nothing better than a freshly picked peppermint. The dried peppermint leave, crushed and put in a tea bag is not as nice as the fresh thing and that was a bit of the challenge. But over time, people became accustomed to it and they liked the convenience,” he said.
But at the time the company was bought in 1996, its size meant Mahfood and his father could not depend on it. The son took a job at GraceKennedy in that same year, leaving the management of the business to his father.
“I joined GraceKennedy in 1996 at the same time that we bought the company and my father ran the business from 1996 to about 2007. I left GraceKennedy in 2006. From 2006 onwards we were together. My first responsibility at GraceKennedy was exports. I was responsible for GraceKennedy’s export business and that is what drove my experience and desire to focus on exporting and the fact that when I was at GraceKennedy, we would try to develop the export business for the factories that GraceKennedy owns,” he said.
