Good & Proper Tea is a female-led, sustainability-driven brand that’s revolutionising the way people drink tea.
Given it’s the most popular manufactured beverage – with 62 billion cups of tea being consumed every year in Britain alone – the G&P mission is a genuine game-changer.
Unleashed’s Bryony Hampton sat down with Josh Mordecai, Head of Operations and Sales at Good & Proper Tea, to learn about the struggles and successes they’ve faced in recent years.
- Check out the video below or visit our Supply Chain Podcast page to listen to the full interview.
From van to venture: How Good & Proper grew their brew
Josh Mordecai has been a pivotal member of the Good & Proper Tea team for over seven years. As the leader of the Operations and Sales divisions, he’s played an integral role in its growth and survival.
“I oversee our end-to-end supply chain—” Josh tells Bryony, “—getting the tea from the tea-growing places to our end users and everything in between. I also oversee our business development team.”
Today, Good & Proper Tea can be found in countless cafes and restaurants worldwide. But as Josh explains, things weren’t always that way.
“We started life in an old Citroen H van, and we were the first UK brand on Kickstarter.”
The demand for better-quality tea was huge, translating to early success for G&P.
“It turns out there were loads of other frustrated tea drinkers out there, and the project was funded really quickly.
Quali-tea leads to quanti-tea
“People want to drink great tea,” Josh says. “Our mission is to get more people to drink good tea and raise the profile of good tea. You've seen it happen with coffee; tea is a bit behind in that lifecycle.”
After a successful fundraising effort, Good and Proper’s growth escalated.
“We moved into some physical retail spaces. We had tea bars around London. The flagship one was on Leather Lane near Hatton Garden. We are now served in over 1,500 cafes, restaurants, hotels, and offices.
“As of last month, we are selling two tonnes of tea and herbs per month, which equates to about a million cups of tea.”
Sustainability in the tea supply chain
Despite the rapid rise, the G&P team never forgot where they came from.
“Independent cafes are our bread and butter because that's where we started.”
This might be related to the environmental and social impetus behind Good & Proper’s mission:
“Sustainability is top of the agenda. It's always been part of our fabric. Making a profit is not the only goal; it's doing right by people on the planet.”
When you’re dealing with different regions and different challenges, sustainability in the supply chain becomes a nuanced affair.
Josh hints at one detail that remains consistent: the significance of sustainable packaging.
“Packaging in tea is really important. The key thing is making sure that when it gets to that customer, the leaf is still intact. You want to find something which protects the leaf but also has the least impact on the environment.
“There's a whole conversation around tea bags and plastic, which is great. But there's an easy answer to that. And that is just for people to buy loose leaf. The customer gets better value for money. It's much less impactful on the environment. And the tea tastes better.”
To counter the problem with plastic tea bags, G&P resorted to a biodegradable bioplastic alternative.
“Our tea bags have always been plastic-free,” Josh says. “They're made of a plant-based material called Soilon, which is industrially compostable.”
Nowadays, their focus is on optimising their sustainability efforts with a data-driven approach – aided by the company’s status as a B Corp firm.
“For us to have a longer-term and bigger impact, our best starting point is to improve the quality of the data.
“I think becoming B Corp certified has been a great lens to look at the business holistically as we scale and make decisions.”
Standing out in a competitive marketplace
One of the biggest challenges Good & Proper Tea faces is selling products in a saturated industry.
“The barriers to entry in tea are pretty low,” Josh explains. “[Anybody] could easily start a tea brand. There are companies with catalogues and different flavoured teas – you could go and buy those teas, have them packed in a bag, and start.”
To survive in a competitive landscape, differentiation is critical.
“We have multiple USPs. First is the quality of our tea. We go to great lengths to source really good teas, and we've been building up relationships with suppliers over the 12 years we've been in business. We do a lot of tasting to ensure that our products stand out and that we are sourcing the best possible tea we can for the price point that we're trying to hit.
“Second is the level of support and service we provide. Customers can have the best tea in the world, but if they're not brewing it properly, they're not going to bring out that flavour. So we do loads of training, we've got loads of digital resources.
“[Third is] availability, ensuring our customers have no reason to go elsewhere. We've won plenty of business from other tea brands whose English breakfast tea, which is a core part of any cafe's offering, goes off sale and they need tea. We make sure we have breakfast tea the entire time. It's the most important product in our range in that respect.”
Keeping the kettle hot during the COVID-19 pandemic
Like most sectors, COVID-19 offered unprecedented challenges for the global tea industry – Good & Proper Tea included.
“[The pandemic] was very tough for everyone,” says Josh. “90% of what we were doing was food service, and that switched off overnight when the first lockdown happened. Our customers couldn't open their doors, they were left with a lot of stock.
“We [asked ourselves], ‘Okay, what are we going to do with the staff? Are we all going to work part-time?’”
Going lean was their only option.
“We had to furlough our entire team of account managers. We stripped [the business] back to the bare bones. We operated an incredibly lean team.
“It was me, Emily (our founder), and Ollie (our warehouse manager at the time). We were doing all our own distribution. While we were incredibly busy, our hospitality business had fallen off a cliff – there was still a lot to do.
“It required us to have better processes and organisation, and forced us to be more disciplined, which is probably no bad thing.”
To make up for a smaller team and limited resources, G&P outsourced operations to third-party companies.
“Now they arguably do a much better job than we were doing. But I think what's really important is building those relationships with [third-party services]. We see it as a partnership.”
Leveraging modern tools to navigate the challenges of tea distribution
Selling tea by the truckload is no cup of … you get the picture.
“There was a cash flow challenge,” Josh tells Bryony. “We went with a collaborative [approach] with our suppliers and customers. We recognized that everyone was in this together and that we needed to work together to navigate this tricky period.”
In addition to increased supply chain collaboration, G&P focussed on the digital side of the business to help solve some of its biggest challenges.
“We took the opportunity to spruce up the website. We worked with an agency to look at SEO. We migrated to Shopify. One of the main benefits was that it integrated with Unleashed.
“We adopted [Unleashed] relatively early in our lifecycle. It created a huge amount of transparency for us. As you grow, you appreciate that even more.”
Josh says that the transparency Unleashed offers is essential for understanding profitability and ensuring a stable supply of cash flow.
“The last two years have been challenging from a margin perspective. We've seen cost increases across the board, as have our suppliers.
“[With Unleashed], we've managed to achieve efficiencies of scale. Larger production runs, larger purchases of tea… having that data there and being able to make data-driven decisions is really important for us.”
What does accurate demand forecasting mean to you?
Predicting future demand is vital for minimising waste and ensuring a steady supply of capital throughout the year.
As Josh points out: “[Demand forecasting] is a combination of things. It's an art, not a science.”
At Good & Proper, Josh and his team consider multiple factors when building their demand forecasts.
“We look at how much we sold last year, how many more customers we've onboarded, what customers are taking, which products. I'll often look at historical growth by channel. We try to get as much data as we can and then make an educated guess.”
How it’s going: Matching the matcha demand
Josh adds, “An example of a [recent] forecasting win is matcha lattes. Most cafes now have matcha lattes as part of their offering. They look great on Instagram.
“We noticed that that was significantly increasing and forecasted accordingly. We worked closely with our supply partners to try to meet this demand that we thought was going to be there.”
As a result, their matcha sales are through the roof.
“We've seen 155% year-on-year growth in our latte grade matcha. We've managed to maintain really good availability throughout, and it's now our highest-grossing product.”
