Some of the more keen readers of our blog may have noticed an article we posted some time ago about the brand Elmwood created called “Make Mine A Builders”, at the time a new tea brand for the UK market. We heard from Elmwood at a seminar about how they created the brand through traditional marketing routes and how successful the brand and product became being listed in most of the major multiples. Well, we were rather shocked here at Network Marketing Towers to hear on Wake Up To Money on Radio 5 Live this morning that one of the leading tea brands is to reduce the size of tea bags by 7%! They certainly won’t be making it a Builders but we wondered what the impact of this might be. The brand is PG Tips and we spotted this article regarding The Great Tea Rip Off and how they have reduced the content of their tea bags (ie the tea itself) by 7%! They claim there is no reduction in the quality of the brew and that customers will not notice the difference.

The actual impact is going to be an extra 4.2 seconds of brewing time based on a standard 1 minute brewing time. If you are Jonathan Robinson from our Manchester office then this increases to a massive 12.6 seconds as he leaves the bag in forever!

So, where do you draw the line? Are you happy to brew your tea for longer? Does it taste worse as you leave the tea bag in longer? Are you a tea bag squeezer or do you prefer to remove un-squeezed (yes there are some people out there like this...). These and many other tea based questions will be debated in our kitchen this morning as we’re making the first round. Enjoy your day!