Serving the right coffee beans can be make or break for a café, but the same care is not often applied to tea offerings. Samantha Brown reveals how upping their tea game can be a powerful way for cafés to create repeat business.
In today’s hyper-competitive café market, exploring any point of difference to bring customers back through the doors is essential.
Whether through the creation of cool signature drinks, new and exciting food options, or the crafting of a unique vibe, there are countless ways to grow that loyalty.
There is one demographic of traditional customers that has often been neglected as this shift towards specialty coffee and higher quality food has evolved. Tea drinkers.
Tasmania’s Art of Tea has supplied its range of teas to cafés across Australia for more than 20 years. Owner Samantha Brown believes venues that provide a superior tea experience can put themselves one step ahead of the competition.
“Cafés want to create loyalty in their customers,” she says. “Tea drinkers are just as fussy – if not fussier – than coffee drinkers, and the tea lover needs just as much attention from a café as the coffee lover.
“The best way to really frustrate a tea drinker in a café is to present a beautifully handcrafted coffee from a local roaster to someone else at the table, and then just plonk down a mug or teapot with a teabag in front of them. If you treat your tea drinkers like royalty – the same way you treat your coffee consumers – you’ll get an amazing return from them.
“If a café has exceptional tea, these customers will be loyal to them forever. Being able to provide a curated, quality tea experience is invaluable in developing incredibly strong customer relationships.”
Art of Tea started its journey at Hobart’s famous Salamanca Market in 2000, with Samantha taking over the business in 2007. Under her stewardship as ‘The Tea Lady’, the company has grown from a popular market stall into a tea retailer and supplier that sends its products all around the country.
It imports single-estate tea leaves from origins including India, China, and Sri Lanka, while also selling Australian-grown teas – some of which are even grown in Tasmania. In 2019, it also switched to organically sourced ingredients for its herbal blends.
“People are definitely seeking out higher quality and nuanced flavours in their tea, and the health benefits that are present in green, black, and herbal teas tie into people becoming more mindful about their overall health,” says Samantha.
“We clearly have a strong coffee culture in Australia, but customers are becoming more discerning and they really want a quality tea made locally.”
Despite having 150 varieties of tea on offer, Samantha says there is a pair that consistently prove themselves as customer favourites in Art of Tea’s wholesale and retail trade.
“We have two outstanding teas that are by far our most popular. Our Indian Chai is our best seller to our café clients despite the fact we have about 10 different chai varieties, including three caffeine-free options. It’s loose leaf with real spices and no added flavours, sugars, fillers, or preservatives,” she says.
“Then there’s our Tasmanian Breakfast, which is an incredibly popular alternative to English Breakfast. It’s our highest selling tea for good reason – it brews up to be mid-full strength without the clawing of a higher tannin tea. It can be enjoyed with or without milk, and we’re always receiving feedback about how much customers love it.”
Also included in Art of Tea’s products is its Wildlife Tea range, with a percentage of proceeds of each sale of these teas donated directly to Bonorong Wildlife Hospital – an initiative the company has supported for the past 15 years.
Samantha says handcrafting teas with her own recipes offers a significant point of difference in the service Art of Tea can provide its café partners.
“Like most of my teas, the Indian Chai and Tasmanian Breakfast are my unique recipes developed from years listening to both retail customers and the café industry,” she says.
“The fact we’re an Australian-owned, Tasmanian-made product is an added selling point for cafés that use our tea. It’s like choosing a small, artisanal roaster. You’re getting quality that has had a lot of attention paid to it,” says Samantha.
In a time when many Australian businesses are outsourcing key elements like customer service and packaging to second or third parties, Samantha says the Art of Tea team prides themselves on their end-to-end customer service.
The tea leaves, spices, herbs and floral ingredients are all hand blended, packaged, and shipped by the small, all-female Art of Tea team in Kingston, just south of Hobart.
“We’re here to speak to cafés and help them with their needs and are always at the other end of the phone – we’re not a bot or a chat. We’re real, we’re authentic, and we know our teas.
“We have a one-to-one relationship with all our hospitality and retail customers. We speak directly with the cafés and businesses we work with.”
Samantha says that personalised relationship enables fast service, even from Tasmania.
“Although we’re hand-making our products, we send orders out same or next day. Sometimes people on the mainland have a fear that us being in Tasmania means delivery will be slow, but it’s truly not a problem. Our reviews speak volumes about our efficiency and speedy delivery times,” she says.
Given Art of Tea has full control over its own packaging and blends, it is also able to customise its products for cafés to help ensure they further stand out from the crowd.
“We can custom blend a tea for a café and we can create custom labels,” she says.
“For example, if we’re partnered with Red Corner Café, we can package up the box so it has their label and branding on it, so they can retail it to their customers. It’s still our tea and our brand, but it creates a new and unique retail proposition for the café.
“We have customers all over Australia who have been buying tea from us for more than 20 years. Because of that I am fully confident we are producing a high-end product that they love and delivering it to them reliably time and time again.”
For more information, visit artoftea.com.au
This article appears in the October 2025 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
