Cambridge Consultants Blog
Innovating 5,000 years of tradition
By Patrick Pordage - Last updated: Wednesday, February 8, 2012
According to a recent CNN article, our obsession with tea has been around for nearly five thousand years, so what can a product development company from Cambridge possibly innovate here? Well, it’s all about watching consumer trends.
Look at the past decade and you’d be hard pushed not to have noticed the arrival of the ‘coffee phenomena’; something that has spread to nearly every major high street. Before the arrival of Starbucks and the like, getting a decent cup of coffee in Britain or the US was a fairly hit and miss experience. Even if you could find one, it probably wasn’t presented with the flair and panache of the true Italian barista; and in part this is what has fueled this retail ‘explosion’. For just couple of pounds, dollars or Euros you can get a minute or two’s theatre whilst someone bustles around a great big steam snorting machine that yields a rather excellent (if not slightly addictive) drink.
Now wind the clock forward to just the last five years or so, and the second global trend is the downturn in the global economy. One thing we’ve noticed is that consumers are shying away from making major financial investments with their cash, and instead are preferring to treat themselves on ‘one of life’s little luxuries’. Or, as the Brisbane Times reports, the ‘Lipstick indicator’ effect, where economists noted how the sale of small luxuries can increase during uncertain economic times, such as the demand for lipstick during World War II.
Cambridge Consultant’s Consumer group, noted these two trends – and with over 30 innovative beverage dispense projects under their belt – wondered why tea drinks got such a rough deal on the high street in comparison to their coffee drinking colleagues. As one of our principal engineers, Edward Brunner commented, “Tea drinkers stand in line in a retail outlet and watch as their coffee-drinking fellow customers are treated to a personal ‘barista experience’. Meanwhile they are presented with a mug of hot water and a soggy bag on a string.” So the challenge was on, and shortly afterwards, the TeaTotal prototype was born.
By identifying the independent variables that impact flavour, and how to separately manipulate them to deliver each consumer’s ideal cup, the Consumer team then set about developing a prototype machine that incorporated this functionality, whilst at the same time keeping a watchful eye on the retailer’s need to keep a high rate of throughput. TeaTotal not only allows you to personalise the taste of your tea, but it is also capable of making the perfect cup in just two minutes; that’s around half the time it’s believed you’ll need to get the same quality drink from a tea pot; not that we have anything against the tea pot you understand… an excellent thing, however, it’s just rarely spotted on today’s high street retail environment, and we are all for ‘Save the teapot’ campaign, that got launched on the same day as our TeaTotal press release was issued.
If you’d like to watch the lab built prototype in action click here and scroll to the bottom of the press release
