Google Trends review of tea trends

First published by Tching here and here.

This subject comes up at the beginning of every year:  what's new in tea, and what's changing (as this World Tea News article covers).  Usually that's none of my concern, but a passing mention of reviewing trends made me wonder if the Google Trends review of what is searched matches up with what is seen as popular. 

I first considered this sort of approach in January of 2014 when I wrote a post about the same theme, back when I was new to blogging.  It seemed there was a mild uptake of interest in tea back then but it wasn't easy to pin that down to a related hot search term.

I'll mostly use Google Trends results here to check on how searches match up with different topics.  In the relatively recent past matcha and boba / bubble tea were popular.  Maybe a bit over a year ago "cheese tea" seemed to come and go, the idea of mixing types of cheese with brewed tea. 

To start, the changes in interest in matcha are familiar to people in the tea industry, or even just from noticing it being sold locally:

Definitely a general increase over the last two years, with a good bit of cyclic variation and spikes over that time.  The same kind of trend occurs with bubble tea (or “boba”):  a bit cyclic, but showing less general increase, maybe not to the extent matcha created an upward trend.  I guess that bubble tea has been popular for awhile, so that a long and gradual upward trend is what one might expect.

I'll try to extract a few subjects to check on from that World Tea News article.  They cite this as a summary finding:

'...we now see the most significant expansion coming from two very distinct market segments: functional botanical blends and single estate artisanal teas."

That second part makes perfect sense to me, about single estate tea interest as a trend, but it's not going to work as a set of Google search terms.  I've written a little on researching functional tisane blends, related to a family friend passing some on from Hawaii, but I'm not sure any one search would capture results.  As with a “single estate artisanal teas” Google Trends doesn't show results for a search like "functional botanical blends" because there aren't enough results to graph, and narrowing it down by picking only some of the terms probably wouldn't be indicative.  A couple more specific references there are at least narrower:

"Flavored teas are very popular... Cold brewing is still a trend on the rise...."

As with functional botanical tisanes or blends flavored teas would be searched for related to too many different terms.  Someone could be looking for fruit teas, or just blueberry, or to replicate a specific Teavana blend, and the search terms would be different for each.

I did checking "cold brewing" but it didn't seem to relate to any trend.  People really could be doing a lot more cold brewing recently without Google searching the subject.  There has also been discussion of blue pea or butterfly pea flower tea becoming more popular, although that theme isn't new to me since it’s a standard tisane in Thailand:

According to this interest really did kick in as of two years ago, and it is possible that more and more people are actually drinking it over those two years while searches vary in number.  "Cheese tea" search results also show interest in that playing through awhile back:

October 2017 to May 2018 defines that period of rise in interest, dropping back to a more moderate level, but never really completely dying off.  I did not realize that “cheese tea” is still an interesting subject, not giving up much ground to matcha, if I’m reading these graphs right.

So trends review did show interest in these subject varying.  Searching terms like "oolong" or "pu'er" turns up flat results; at least according to Trends results input interest stays even for those.  As I think I mentioned five years ago a long, gradual gain in interest in tea might naturally show up as a flat curve in search results, so that's not so bad.

Did I miss checking on the real “next big thing” in tea?  Feel free to add that in the comments, if another more significant trend shows up that I didn’t check.