Lipton is going back to basics, in a way, to add new aroma to its U.S. tea business with the first marketing campaign behind its staple black-tea products in America in nearly a quarter-century.

Lipton—the biggest name in tea globally, at over 100 countries and 100 years old—also has held on to its lead in the US CPG dry-tea market for decades, despite essentially having ignored its basic black teas in a marketing sense.

Now, the Unilever-owned brand has launched a campaign aimed at getting US tea consumers to "Drink Positive" (a play on "Think Positive") and to appreciate the uplift that tea can give them. It's also a move to increase the number of tea-drinkers by skewing younger.

The integrated campaign by DDB New York includes TV, digital (liptontea.com, its US Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter) and a visual refresh by making the iconic Lipton packaging a more vibrant shade of yellow.Continue reading...

Starbucks is certainly feeling bullish these days. Just a few years after scaling back its US retail footprint in a rocky economy, the coffee giant is now eyeing "accelerated global growth" with plans to open thousands of new locations. It's even offering a luxe "superpremium" gift card that'll cost $450 to put in a Christmas stocking.

In a presentation at the company's biennial investor conference today, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz glowed with the news that he plans to boost the number of Starbucks cafes in the Americas by more than 20 percent — opening more than 3,000 new shops over the next five years, including 1,500 in the United States, still its biggest market.Continue reading...

Western retailers have been completely bombarding China with products and sales pitches in recent years. Having more than 1.3 billion consumers living within its borders can make a country’s citizens targets of such things. 

Starbucks is about to go overdrive in its efforts to get the Chinese populace as dependent on their brand as plenty of Americans are, but the sell may not be so coffee-driven, but leverage the brand's tea drinks and food menu. The chain currently has 700 stores in China but that number will more than double in size to 1,500 in the next three years, according to the Wall Street Journal. That growth will also mean the chain’s employees in China will go from 12,000 today to 30,000 in three years. It also offers regional websites for Eastern China and Northern China.

Coffee sales went up 20% in 2011 over the previous year and brought in $995 million, WSJ notes, but China is still a tea-drinking nation. So Starbucks established a research-and-development unit in the country in order to figure out what it could do to attract a larger audience than those looking for a cup of joe. As a result, Starbucks China is not only celebrating Western customs such as Christmas, but serving up localized beverage and food items including a red bean frappaccino, green tea tiramisu, a Hainan chicken and rice wrap, a shredded ginger pork panini, and a Thai-style prawn wrap. And the Starbucks kiosks that work so well in the States don’t have the same effect in the Chinese market where consumers desire more space.Continue reading...

Whatever you're sipping these days, Starbucks wants to be the brand you're sipping.

As richly as Starbucks brand has made its name on coffee, selling and evoking the world of coffee-growing, -processing and -drinking, it's the tea universe — with a wide variety of ingredients and flavors and functional purposes — that strikes many as much more intriguing these days. So in announcing its purchase of the Teavana tea chain, the company's biggest-ever acquisition, Starbucks is betting as much on being able to exploit the lore and learning about tea as it is in selling the beverage itself. "We will do for tea what we did for coffee," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told the Wall Street Journal about the $620-million deal.Continue reading...

Sixty six percent of UK citizens collectively consumer 165 million cups of tea every day, making it that country’s most popular drink, and most of those tea bags end up in landfill bins. 

Now Unilever UK, maker of PG Tips and the largest tea buyer in the world, purchasing close to 12% of the world's supply of black tea, is looking to make a more environmentally friendly cuppa.

Already committed to sustainable farming, partnering with the Rainforest Alliance in 2008, the company has just joined forces with two Essex councils, Brentwood and Chelmsford, and with Wrap, the U.K. government's advisory body on waste, to encourage Brit tea-drinkers to compost their teabags with their food waste.Continue reading...

Tropicana's low-cal Trop50 brand has been on a roll lately, and the company is trying to extend this hot sub-brand by invading another segment of the beverage market instead of sticking with juices.

Trop50 Juice with Tea is a fruit-juice and tea mix with "50% less sugar and calories" than regular juice, combining fruit juices with white and green teas, in three flavors. Additionally, Tropicana is introducing a new variety of "regular" Trop50, Red Orange, which provides a full day's supply of vitamin C, and a dose of potassium to boot.

PepsiCo is supporting Trop50 with new TV spots that extend its "Girlfriends" TV campaign starring Jane Krakowski that debuted in Canada.Continue reading...