Find out how Welsh Brew Tea have blended a personal approach to customer service with automated technology processes to grow a successful family business supplying supermarkets across all of Wales.
Superfast Business Wales helped the business increase online sales, find out how you could benefit from the free business support too!
We are Welsh Brew Tea, we’re a family business. We’ve been established for some thirty years. As a family business, we work together – myself, Alan, my father and Sarah, my sister. We are absolutely passionate about what we do. We are a tea company and we blend and pack tea specifically for Welsh Water.
So we’re very lucky in Wales to have beautiful soft water. A Kenyan tea in soft water is strong and full of flavour but can be a little bit bitter so what we do is blend in an Indian Assam amongst others to get the full flavour but a very smooth and clean finish for a good, traditional strong cup of tea but without any bitterness.
Tea is our core business so we went into fruit teas, flavoured teas, herbs and infusions which have been hugely successful, so loose leaf, pyramid diffuser tea bags, all the really cosmopolitan, high-end loose leaf teas. But we also do hot chocolates, and not to mention ground coffees. So, we’ve got three exquisite 100% rainforest alliance ground coffees roasted again with the Welsh water in mind.
In total, we’ve got about 70 products plus nowadays, I mean we’ve got every tea you’d ever dream of.
We have a technology in this office that it supports everything that we do. These are all systems that we use that are all automated through the computer and off the back of that is through broadband. So we need a fast, reactive system to supply all of our customers.
Superfast Business Wales came to us with a consultant and backing and advice. They talked us through what we needed to do and how to do it. They took the technical side and helped us with that because, you know, we’re tea people, we’re not technical people so they came in and helped us with the computers and the systems and put us in the right format so we can go ahead and operate without having to worry about all the back office issues which can so often confuse and slow down otherwise a successful and growing company.
So since speaking with them we’ve developed – they look at our website platform and they developed that and helped us push that dramatically and I would say that’s already improved our growth and sales, and online selling.
They helped us with our accounting package so using the accounts that we now do, it’s automated, it’s different you know, five years ago we were still filling out ledgers and nowadays it’s all online – invoicing etc. has become 20 times easier for us all to operate as a company.
My father started this business as a farm diversification up in Powys, in Newtown. Since then, since supplying a few little supermarkets, a few little post offices around Wales, we now supply every single supermarket in Wales with around 15 different products. We will supply Tesco, we will supply Co-Op, Sainsbury’s, goes through distribution in a central warehouse in England so we send our tea over the border and it goes into them and then it gets shipped back to Wales and it’s put into all the supermarkets in Wales.
We do a huge amount of business with foodservice companies like Castell Howell, sell a huge amount of our product into the foodservice so the cafes. We do lots of selling off the vans. You’ll see me or my father, Alan, in the vans, day in and day out selling, going and meeting our customers in the cafes, dropping in points of sale and jars and caddies to help promote the brand and the product, and to show when people support the Welsh product that we’ll support them.
As a food producer in Wales I would recommend Superfast Business Wales to anybody, if you have a technical side to your business then I think it is key to have superfast broadband to help you to do the daily things in a quick and efficient manner, so absolutely I would recommend it.