It’s Green Tea Time In Honolulu
As the rest of the world discovers the benefits of green, ITO EN introduces a variety of new teas
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Really, it’s easy being green: The ITO EN Team at the Kalihi plant with their line
of various teas displayed on the wall behind them
It’s not easy, to quote Kermit, being green. Especially in the tea business.The sudden popularity of green tea is like a tempest in a pot. It has stirred up so much competition in the beverage industry, it’s hard to tell the players apart. This is particularly so in the ready-to-drink segment, where there is a dizzy array of brands in cans and bottles that you need a gypsy to sort out one tea leaf from another.
Yet, the buzz about the health benefits of green tea continues to spur sales. Green tea is the fastest growing segment among beverages.
Tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world next to water. Americans drink more than 50 billion servings of tea a year, or more than 2.25 billion gallons.
The green tea market segment grew 37 percent between 1997 and 2002, compared to a mere 2 percent growth rate for hot tea sales overall, according to the AC Nielsen research group.
Green tea generates about $625 million, or 12.5 percent, of the $5.5 billion in total tea sales per year.
Over the last 10 years, ready-to-drink tea has grown nearly tenfold. Its sales are conservatively estimated at $2.41 billion, according to the Tea Association of the USA.
The industry anticipates strong, continuous growth, driven by convenience, interest in the healthy properties of tea, and the continued discovery of specialty tea.
What’s all the fuss about? Being green about tea, we ask the experts at ITO EN USA to educate us. It is a refreshing course, to say the least.
Greeting us at the headquarters in Kalihi are Ken Niimura, president, and Leighton Horiuchi, vice president of ITO EN USA. A subsidiary of Japan’s ITO EN Ltd., Hawaii was the first overseas venture of the tea conglomerate.
ITO EN (all caps, two words) is the premier green tea exporter with more than 75 varieties. It was founded in 1966 on a simple premise: to produce and sell a product at the very heart of Japanese culture - green tea. Over the decades, ITO EN has taken this idea and turned it into a phenomenon.
It is a trendsetter in the tea and beverage industries. ITO EN introduced canned green tea in 1985 and is the pioneer of unsweetened ready-to-drink bottled tea.
Though based in Japan, the company has an international outlook.
Since the 1980s, subsidiaries have been established in Hawaii, China, Australia and North America. ITO EN is on the verge of making green tea a part of global culture.
Key to the company’s growth is its dedication to authenticity. Much of the company’s activity is committed to preserving green tea’s essential taste and character.
The unquenchable thirst for green tea has even set Hawaii’s operations on a new course, spurred by double-digit sales growth and phenomenal consumer response. It has sparked creativity and motivation to be the undisputed category leader in this market.
“Green tea is definitely a huge trend,” says Horiuchi. “It’s taken the U.S. by storm. ITO EN Japan is the largest purveyor of green tea in the world. Our whole heritage has been green tea, so our desire is to focus all of our energies and assets there.”
Horiuchi, who was raised in Kona coffee country on the Big Island, knows the beverage business well. Before joining ITO EN in 2000, he worked for 15 years at Anheuser-Busch.
Niimura informs us that ITO EN’s Hawaii office was established in 1987 when it purchased local entities, S&S Saimin and Aloha Maid juice.
S&S Saimin was recently sold to Sun Noodle. But Aloha Maid continues to be a major part of the company’s beverage business in the Islands. The popular canned juice has a rainbow of flavors today and enjoys an enviable market share.
But the introduction of Aloha Maid Green Tea could be the major break-through that sets it apart from the competition, once and for all.
It’s enough to turn challengers green with envy.
To accommodate the juice-green tea formulation and canning, special equipment was added to the 7,000-square-foot plant on Puuhale Road in Kalihi. It is the only one in Hawaii with a secondary pasteurization process that destroys bacteria and extends the shelf life of juices.
Operating five or six days a week, the fully automated plant hums with efficiency, turning out 10,000 cases of Aloha Maid beverages daily. The made-in-Hawaii product is shipped by container-loads to the Mainland West Coast and South Pacific islands.
Niimura and Horiuchi emphasize it is ITO EN’s customers and clients who have made the company a success. In traditional business parlance, they say “the customer comes first.”
In this spirit, five key concepts of natural, safe, healthy, well-designed and delicious are set for all new and existing products, including its Royal Mills coffee and Aloha Maid lines.
These standards also are practiced by the 80 employees of ITO EN USA who are local folks. This is not, as misconceptions might have it, “a Japanese company.” Only recently, in fact, have they recruited trainees from ITO EN Japan to help instill more knowledge and expertise about green tea.
Several of the employees are now certified tea tasters, third grade, specializing in green tea. Two of the employees are tea tasters, second grade, expanding their knowledge to black and oolong teas. (See sidebar about Hiroyuki Kodama).
The backing of ITO EN Japan allows the Hawaii operation to thrive and customize products that please the palates of local folks.
It’s iconic to have a can of Aloha Maid juice with a plate lunch.
Passion-orange, strawberry-guava, fruit punch. Islanders swallow gallons of the sweet tropical drinks at home, at the office and at outdoor events. If you don’t have cases piled up near the refrigerator at home, you probably shouldn’t consider yourself “local.”
However, as the taste of today’s consumers change - oh, we are a fickle lot - folks are looking for beverages with less calories and sugar content.
Aloha Maid’s green tea drinks fill that niche. The crisp, lighter beverage took ITO EN Hawaii’s new product development team “many agonizing months” to formulate the right mix of juice and green tea, as well as the packaging.
But it was worth it. The product is flying off the shelves.
Available in naturally flavored teas, there is no artificial coloring and no green tea from powders or concentrates - this is brewed tea. It’s low in sodium, high in vita-
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