A STARTUP TAKES A SHOT AT $40 BILLION TEA INDUSTRY WITH AN INNOVATIVE HACK

“Coming from a tea family and spending much of my childhood in tea estates, I grew up drinking some of the world’s best teas – so I know how fresh tea is meant to taste,” says Kaushal Dugar, founder and CEO of Teabox. Kaushal’s family has been in the tea business for over 80 years. He started Teabox four years ago when he saw that the traditional warehousing and distribution of tea were inefficient and ill-suited for preserving the freshness of tea that connoisseurs crave. Its investors include Accel Partners and Indian tycoon Ratan Tata. Texas oil baron Robert Bass and Singapore angel investor Cameron Jones, who love their tea, are among its backers. Teabox introduced vacuum packing and cold storages to source teas from hundreds of growers in India and Nepal and deliver them to 95 countries across the world. Now it hopes to take that to a new level with the TeaPacs innovation. The introduction of leaf tea bags may also give a boost to Teabox’s distribution within the country, where a large section of people cannot afford the price of a regular box of premium leaf tea. Sales of shampoo show that small is beautiful in India. The introduction of single-use sachets, which are cheaper to pack and distribute, turned the industry on its head. Indians today use more sachet-sized shampoos than the regular-sized ones, according to Nielsen. The sachet packaging formula has subsequently been extended to other consumer products from creams to sauces. .