For this last Tea and Coffee Trade Journal, post, I wanted to look at what the journal published related to tea. The 1925 issues didn’t disappoint.
The advertising is usually one of the first things I notice. Older advertising is always fun, either because of the style or the graphics. In this case, I liked the tea-related advertising because of what was actually being advertised. There were many ads for tea related items including tea bags from companies like Cooper Tea Packet Co. Inc., Bags by Royal, and Tea Bags Manufacturing Co., Inc., and National Urn Bag Company advertising for their aluminum ring tea bags. There was even tea ball gauze from Slocum & Company.
The articles were particularly interesting, not because they were reporting on tea, but because they looked at particular places connected with the tea industry and featured interesting images. There were several pieces about Sumatra, with photographs of places and people engaged in a variety of activities. There was a two-part series, “Little Journey to Insulinde,” focusing on the east coast of Sumatra in the July issue and Java in the August issue, as well as a separate piece in July that looked at the tea industry in Sumatra generally. The September issue had a lengthy piece entitled, “A Little Journey to China,” which included a chart of tea exports from China between 1921-1923, along with the countries the tea was being shipped to.
Americans tend to drink more coffee than tea, but tea is an important commodity in world commercial history, and trying to improve the U.S. tea market explains the regular column, “How to Increase Tea Consumption.” The piece, published in August, had a few things of note. Part of the column described how using a tea ball would counter “improper brewing methods” that “kept tea consumption low.” However, most of the column was under the subtitle “Coffee Growing; Tea Losing” and was written as a conversation between a Tea Man and an Advertising Man, and accompanied by the chart below.
Being a trade journal, there were statistics for all sorts of things peppered throughout the publication. In my first post, I mentioned the Price Current column, but there were more. In just those 1925 issues I looked at, other statistics I found included: annual tea reports issued in London (July); tea data from 1921-24 by type, country, and U.S. examinations district; (September); tea exports from India for the season ending March 31, 1925 and tea imported into the U.S. from 1913-1925, by place (August).
This is just our most recent foray into the subject of the tea business, because we have published two posts previously, one on tearooms and another on a Seattle tea merchant.
Hopefully, with these posts I have given you a better understanding of what this publication has to offer. If you didn’t get a chance to read the previous posts you can go back and read the introductory post and the coffee and chocolate post in this mini-series.
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