Author丨Huai'an
Editor丨Tangerine
In this moment, the same origin is not the same life, which is reflected in the ready-to-drink tea and the original leaf tea. The ready-to-drink tea that rolls out of the "sky" and the Qingming tea that falls into the mortal world are both related and completely different. Then, the question is, how much raw leaf tea consumption can the growing ready-to-drink tea drive?
Purchase prices continue to fall
The hot and cold alternation and contradictory relationship of the market exist on many levels. For example, when it comes to tea, ready-to-drink tea and raw leaf tea, this April has a completely different situation.
"It's really incredible, the purchase price of hand-picked tea in Qingming tea is only 9 yuan per catty, and the price of new leaves has fallen to 2 yuan per catty on April 13. Tea Mountain is a large area of abandoned tea, this price, let alone handmade tea, it is estimated that machine picking tea can not survive. It is estimated that it is necessary to survive by mining more than four leaves and one core. Counting fertilizers should not be profitable. This price estimates that only old leaf teas such as white tea can survive. "This is the content shared by an investor on an investment platform.
He didn't elaborate on it, and he didn't respond to anyone who wanted to find out.
Coincidentally.
A post of "Tea plummeted this year, the market is not good, what else can I do" has sparked a lot of resonance on a social platform. The post came from a tea merchant who claimed to be "the second generation of tea mountain", according to his observation, "this year's low-end tea has fallen, and almost all varieties are available."
Due to the lack of "production area" in the aforementioned information, Nei Sanjun took a look at it a little.
"This year's tea has indeed fallen quite sharply. On the 16th, a tea merchant who had just returned to his store in a first-tier city from the tea mountain in Fu'an, Fujian Province, said frankly.
He has been making tea since 2009 and is a comprehensive tea chain enterprise integrating tea production, production, marketing and scientific research. White tea is their core product, but in fact, because of the linkage between tea merchants and in order to provide customers with a richer range of products, green tea, black tea, pu'er, small green mandarin ...... You name it, they have it.
In his opinion, April 13 is not a good time for Qingming tea of white tea. The first and second grade peonies (variety name) are gone; yes, they are all Shou Mei (variety name) grade, 5-6 yuan a pound (tea green). Because the weather is getting hotter, the tea leaves grow very quickly, almost 10 centimeters long.
"The price of tea this year has indeed fluctuated a lot. "Around the 10th, when he was still in Futian, he could be regarded as personally experiencing the excessive variety of tea green (freshly picked leaves from the tea garden as raw materials for processing finished tea. The purchase price was 1.7 yuan per catty on the first day, 3 yuan on the next day, and 2 yuan on the third day. "The key to the fluctuation of prices lies in the relationship between supply and demand, if the tea farmers go up the mountain to pick more on the same day, the market will increase the number of green tea, the purchase price will go down, otherwise, the price will be pulled up, and so on. ”
A key problem is that the current purchase price simply cannot "bear" the labor. Restricted by the topography, many tea gardens are terraced, manual tea picking is 200 yuan per person per day, but also to manage 2-3 meals, some even have to pay transportation expenses, the average labor cost is 200-300 yuan per day; for many farmers, the high cost and low purchase price lead to the direct result - abandonment.
As for himself, because it is a corporatized operation, he began to go up the mountain to pick tea as early as March 10 this year. At that time, all the picks were silver needles, and in order to make organic tea, the requirements for each link were relatively high, and the initial purchase price, how could 1 catty get 200+, and it slowly dropped to 100+, but compared to the price of a few dollars a catty, it was still many times higher.
"Affected by the environment, this year, we have already told our customers - because of the quality of our tea and the process of making tea, we don't want to come to us according to the market conditions, we don't have the kind of cheap tea that costs tens of dollars a pound in the market. The aforementioned tea merchant said.
To sum up, compared with last year, the purchase price of tea in his tea-producing area has dropped by 20%-30%. There are two reasons for this, one is that many small and medium-sized tea enterprises dare not make tea this year, because last year's work has not been sold, and this year they do not dare to buy tea in a large area; in addition, in March this year, the weather is still relatively cool, the tea grows slowly, and there is not much difference between picking two days later, but the weather suddenly turns hot, and the tea is easy to have insects, so it has to be picked; at the same time, there are many tea greens that flow to the production area from other places, and the price is pulled down all of a sudden.
Another feeling he has is that in today's live broadcast with goods, many people use the concept of production areas, use not very good tea, and sell them at a relatively low price, but they still make a lot of money;
As one of the most representative of Qingming tea, Longjing tea is different.
"Polarization is serious, and the core production areas are actually not worried about selling." Tea farmers located in the core production area of Longjing tea said. Of course, he has many innate advantages that tea farmers do not have, for example, he lives in Longjing Village (Shifeng Mountain), has 28 acres of tea plantations, and has been awarded the "big tea planter" by the township government.
In his eyes, the above remarks are a bit of a "gimmick and hype" to a certain extent, and the industry is "too rolly"; 2 yuan a catty, even labor is not enough, it is definitely not the core production area, and it is impossible to be manually picked, nor is it Longjing tea. ”
Of course, this is related to the production area where he is located, the core production area of West Lake Longjing, no matter how bad the market is, the really good tea is still not sold. However, he also admitted that the price of Longjing tea this year has also "fallen quite sharply, because the previous hype was too strong".
Those in non-core production areas are not so lucky.
The tea mountain contracted by the above-mentioned "tea merchant negative second generation" happens to be on the edge of the phoenix single bush, and he changed his career from urban white-collar workers to making tea, and he is still in debt for 3 years.
At the end of last year, when a tea merchant approached him to "pre-harvest" the green tea, he quoted 20 yuan for 1 catty, but in mid-April, the price became 12 yuan. He said that he is worse than the tea farmers, because the tea mountain is contracted, not only planting, maintenance, picking costs, but also rent, "For tea farmers, the market is not good, you can also tighten your belt, we are directly at a loss, the profit itself is not high, the risk is slightly larger can not be carried, and there may be bankruptcy." ”
Ready-to-drink tea "rescue" is hopeless
"This year, tea farmers are miserable, and prices have plummeted, which is already the consensus in the industry. An industry insider said frankly, "From south to north, a conservative estimate is a decline of 20%. In some producing areas, when the purchase price was at its lowest, it was nearly half lower than last year", and a tea merchant who makes Anji white tea even said, "I have not seen such a low price in 10 years".
The "minus second generation" said that he had no reverence for agriculture before (it is not easy to make tea on a large scale), and encountered a bad "cycle" - the economic environment is sluggish, and nearly 60% of the political and commercial purchases in the earlier business are almost left; if they face consumers, not only can they not sell at a price, but the quantity is still small. Multiple factors are superimposed, and the situation is grim.
In the middle of the month, he didn't even want to continue picking tea. The reason is that if you pick it, you can't sell it, and it's not just planting, maintenance, but also labor, storage, and so on. What's worse is the inventory. As a small tea merchant, the inventory of "negative second generation" finished tea is 10,000 catties, and the inventory that floods the entire tea industry is even larger. This is also an important reason for the "plummeting" of Qingming tea prices this year.
In May, it will soon enter the spring tea picking season for high mountain tea, especially in Taiwan. In the eyes of a Taiwanese tea merchant, the current tea industry is too volatile, not only chaotic, "fake tea" (not tea produced in a veritable production area) but also a lot. "At present, I don't know if the purchase price of Taiwan's high mountain tea will also fall, but the business is really not good. ”
Qingming tea, as a classification of raw leaf tea, actually contains many types of tea. They can all become raw materials for tea beverages and are at the source of the ready-to-drink tea industry chain. The current situation is that although the upstream of the industrial chain is "falling endlessly", the downstream ready-to-drink tea market can be described as "against the sky".
The old Oriental leaves, Suntory rights and not mention. Just before the arrival of summer, many companies such as Nestle, Uni-President, Dali, Dongpeng, Wahaha and so on have launched their own new tea drinks, and there are more than 30 of them. Why?
First of all, in 2023, Nongfu Spring Tea Beverage products recorded an annual revenue of 12.659 billion yuan, an increase of 83.3% over 2022, accounting for 29.7% of the total revenue in 2023. The key point is that in 2023, Nongfu Spring tea beverage products will record an annual revenue of 12.659 billion yuan, an increase of 83.3% over 2022.
Secondly, the industry. According to the data released by Instant Win in March this year, based on the overall beverage, from January 2022 to December 2023, the overall ready-to-drink tea will peak at about 14% year-on-year in 2022, and increase to a peak of more than 17% in the same period in the peak season in 2023, while sugar-free ready-to-drink tea, as a part of the ready-to-drink tea, has also increased from a peak share of about 3% in the peak season of 2022 to a peak market share of about 5% in 2023.
Finally, data from the Yiou think tank shows that the online sales of sugar-free tea drinks have increased from 467.95 billion yuan in 2018 to 4,473.07 billion yuan in 2022, achieving a nearly 10-fold increase in five years......
If the accounting is a little rougher, it takes about 5 catties of tea to make 1 kg of finished tea. Then, according to the current low price, the purchase price of 1 catty of green tea is 2 yuan, and the purchase price of 1 catty of finished tea is 10 yuan. This is the price of two bottles of 500 ml of Oriental leaves. However, how much tea is used in a mainstream 500ml bottle of sugar-free ready-to-drink tea on the market?
According to public information, in the content of D brand sugar-free tea, the part related to tea is 100% tea leaves, and it is naturally extracted without adding a little tea powder. Because its official website does not announce the amount of tea leaves for green tea and Longjing tea, if you take black oolong as a reference, this amount is 3 grams per liter. In other words, 2 bottles of 500ml sugar-free tea used 3 grams of raw leaf tea.
Looking at other brands, the green tea tea addition amount is 7 grams per liter in S family sugar-free clear tea, the green mandarin pu-erh tea of Y brand contains 4.4 grams of pu-erh tea and 0.1 grams of green mandarin peel per liter, 4 grams of jasmine tea (including 0.3 grams of super-grade Maofeng jasmine tea) and 0.04 grams of green tea per liter are used in jasmine tea, and the jasmine tea of R brand contains no less than 5 grams of jasmine tea per liter......
If you take a medium and use 5 grams per liter as a reference, a simple and crude math problem should look like this, a 500ml bottle of sugar-free tea on the market needs 2.5 grams of raw leaf tea. Then, 1 kg of raw leaf tea can produce at least 200 bottles of sugar-free ready-to-drink tea. Only a small tea merchant's inventory is 10,000 catties, if you want to rely on ready-to-drink tea to "mention" the price of this year's original leaf tea, "eliminate" the inventory of original leaf tea, and can only "float a big white".
Interestingly, 3 of the above-mentioned sugar-free tea brands and Neisanjun have asked about the area where they officially purchase tea, as well as the purchase volume and cost, but without exception, they chose "not to respond" because they were sensitive and inconvenient to disclose.
Of course, as the head brand or strong brand in sugar-free tea drinks in the past two years, they should not be "offline" in the purchase of tea, but the profits of tea drinks naturally need not be said. Could it be that overwhelmed tea farmers and tea merchants should brew tea leaves into water and sell them?