Green Matcha Tea

This author lived over five years in southwest England and never once saw Lipton Tea in the shops.  Ding-dong me assumed that Lipton Tea was an exclusively American icon which centered its marketing on North America (and maybe South America).  Now that I live in America again, Lipton tea is in every shop you can find, even drug and convenience stores.  When I took this assignment to write 400+ words about Lipton Tea, I thought I’d be writing about an exclusively American icon.

How Wrong I Was

Lipton Tea is a British company, founded by Thomas Lipton, who was a Scotsman.  He is one of a number of Scottish innovators that lead to the choosing of Star Trek’s miracle-working engineer to be Scottish (and nicknamed “Scotty”, to boot).  Sir Lipton lived in America from 1865 – 1870 and learned a lot about the American brand of in your face outrageous advertising.

The first Lipton tea shop opened in 1870 in Glasgow, Scotland.  At first, this tea shop was a fully fledged grocery, with the first successful advertising campaign being bacon, but eventually Lipton specialized in tea.  This decision was spurred on by Lipton managing to snap up five bankrupt tea plantations in Ceylon.  That’s a lotta tea…no wait, that’s another tea company…

ANYWAY…

Sir Lipton came up with the manes “brisk tea” and “orange pekoe”.  There actually is no specific tea blend called orange pekoe or brisk, but since the public bought so much Lipton tea, that’s what they started to ask for.  Other brands of tea in America have tea listed as “orange pekoe” just to let the public know what flavor their tea is similar to.

Lipton Tea spread all over the world and did an incredible business in America.  Sir Lipton often sailed back and forth to America in ships as a great publicity stunt.  He died filthy rich.  But Lipton tea did not stop with Sir Lipton’s passing.  In 1952, they patented a four sided teabag.  Tea bags had been available since 1903, but were rare.  With a convenient and affordable tea bag, bagged tea became the norm.

Lipton Tea is now owned by mega-conglomerate Unilever (which also owns Dove hair and skin care products, Close Up toothpaste and Vaseline, among others) but still remains one of the largest tea sellers in the world.  Their tea line includes herbal teas, green matcha tea, decaffeinated and green teas, as well as the classic “Orange Pekoe”.