TGIMT! (Thank Goodness It's Milk Tea!)
Happy Friday, and welcome to our first ever newsletter! We just wanted to give our friends, family and supporters some exciting updates on what we’re up to. And for once, just start the weekend off with some good news! So… TGIMT!
Now that we have your attention, when is the launch happening?!
You might have seen on our website that we were scheduled to launch in the Summer of 2020, but guess what, Fall officially started 3 days ago! 😅 We had samples, we sourced the ingredients, we were ready to to start a marketing blitz. But the taste was just not there.
We received these unbranded samples below in early June thinking we could hit your fridges by September, however after tasting them, I knew we had more work to do.
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From the very beginning, we’ve set our standards high, to create a milk tea that not only tastes as good as (or better than) your favorite milk tea from a cafe, but to use the best ingredients as possible. With this mission, we decided to re-formulate, and find a better source for our teas. We originally sourced an organic tea from a local wholesaler, but needed to add natural flavoring in order to boost the flavor to withstand the sterilization process to make our product shelf stable. To be completely honest, I was not happy with having to add any sort of additional flavor — the tea needs to stand for itself.
Refusing to compromise, we ended up partnering with a new tea supplier, one that supplied tea direct from biodiverse organic family farms in China, so direct that we can name the person who is growing tea! Not only are these teas ethnically sourced and fairly traded, meaning that farmers gets paid fairly for their product and labor rather giving all their profits to a middle man and reseller, they are also growing their tea in a biodiverse environment, only producing in season and not draining the soil of all its nutrients. (Side note: check this Netflix documentary on how soil health can help reverse climate change). During these months of working from home with kids, and double-quarantining in the Bay Area as we shelter from COVID-19 and unprecedented California wildfires, we wanted to focus on our social mission and minimize our impact on the environment more than ever.
While these teas come at a premium, they also taste incredible and retain their flavor much better than the organic black and jasmine tea that we were originally sourcing. Hence a win: a great tasting milk tea, with no additional flavoring, and one that matches our social mission.
With this new formulation, we are also testing a new top-secret (sort-of) technology that will make our milk tea taste sweeter and creamier without adding more creamers or sugar! 🤯 This is where we are currently at, and we are super excited to be the first ready-to-drink beverage product to have this technology! Great ideas take time, so this is the second part of the reason why this launch is taking so long.
So the short answer is, we hope to launch in November, hopefully before the holidays so you can stock up and share them with your friends and family! In the meantime, please tell them to sign up for our newsletter!
Thank you again for your support as we continue on our journey to bring you the world’s first sustainably delicous canned milk tea!
Yours tea-ly, Pauline Ang Founder & CEO Twrl Milk Tea
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