Will the US specialty tea industry ever develop?

 

This really started with discussing this topic with my brother.  He's an economist, more or less, with a phd in policy analysis from a very well regarded school, and many years of consulting related to that.  Not a tea drinker though, really.  He tends to see things a lot differently than I do, which I'll fill in as background.

First, did the US specialty tea industry already develop, so I'm way off in describing this context?  Let's consider some stats:

Market size of tea in the United States from 2013 to 2021, by segment

And then there is this:

New Report Covers Specialty Tea Market (in World Tea News, in 2019)

There are 1,607 specialty tea businesses in the U.S. of which 255 outlets are chains with five or more locations, according to State of the US Specialty Tea Industry(2019), a newly released market research report published by SinensisResearch.

The total U.S. specialty retail market grosses between $690 million and $1.2 billion annually, according to a nationwide survey of tearoom owners and managers. 

Those two claims don't match, since 2019 specialty segment was identified as worth 2.68 billion USD in 2019 per the other source, but it's close enough.  Let's place that against a reference value, for coffee:

Coffee - Worldwide:  Revenue in the Coffee segment amounts to US$433.60bn in 2022. The market is expected to grow annually by 7.64% (CAGR 2022-2025).

It seems likely that is comparing apples and oranges, in terms of different kinds of stats, even beyond the drink / commodity being different.  But still comparing $13 billion in total 2022 market value to that $433 seems clear enough; there is a difference in scale.  I don't know what "specialty coffee" would even be, so let's leave off there, and accept that specialty tea demand is still limited.  1 to 3 billion USD isn't bad, but in a different sense it's also not significant.  Higher quality tea interest never really did "take off."

There are more vendors now than a decade ago, considerably more, and some of their businesses thrive.  Related to pu'er White 2 Tea and Crimson Lotus were both founded around a decade ago, and Bitterleaf and regional sources like Kuura more recently.  So awareness and demand did increase, just not on the same scale as specialty coffee or craft beer, or even matcha and bubble tea.

My brother's explanation

For background context, I don't agree with almost anything he says, but his input always seems to have some value.  

His take:  Americans appreciate foods that are easy to access, simple, and approachable, but intense in flavor and dietary input, at least in terms of providing calories, fat, protein, or a stimulant effect.  Coffee works as an example; someone hands you a cup, or maybe you brew it in a machine, and a lot of standard to-go versions contain 150 - 200 mg of caffeine, quite a jolt.  Then a minority loves the messing around, pour-over forms or whatever else, as is more the rule with tea.  Beer is like that too, either plain, simple, and cheap, or else more complex, varied, and expensive, but still not exactly something related to working through a learning curve.  A preference curve sure, but you only need to sit at a bar or buy a six-pack.

His guess at whether or not that couldn't shift, and people couldn't begin to demand less straightforward, more foreign-associated, more diverse, and healthier drink choice options is no, just no.  His reasoning is that the trend for this demand pattern change over the last 3 or 4 decades has been very consistent.  There was a craft foods sub-theme that ran counter to this pattern a decade or so ago, but it came and went fast enough that it doesn't necessarily seem like much of a counter-argument.  Craft beer, craft chocolate, and bread making all became popular, those hipster themes, but it never really impacted specialty tea as much.  I was there as a tea enthusiast across that time period; I don't really need the stats, since plenty of online discussion hearsay filled in lots of varying perspectives.  Specialty tea was seen as growing, as the potential next big thing, but everyone could agree that it was about to really happen, but hadn't yet.

According to that main graph reference specialty tea sales have doubled in the past decade; that's something, right?  My brother commented that even if inflation had been taken into account marginal gains could also relate to the marginal growth of the population and economy.  Of course our main discussion was about the larger level, about why growth seemed slow, not so much moderate, and whether or not it could increase.  I think that demand could shift and increase, past some unknown tipping point, but that hunch is not based on much.

Next we discussed what it should mean, or at least might mean, that social media group member counts have really blown up over the last half dozen years.  There are 26k+ in the Facebook group I co-founded and moderate, and 600k+ in r/tea, the main Reddit group (689k now).  His take:  exposure to all sorts of social media groups has exploded, so that may relate to people initiating such contact now, not so much a shift in preference or awareness.  Anecdotal accounts continually describe consumers being new to better loose tea, moving on from blends or tea bag types, but those are impossible to place, probably impossible to pin down decent related stats, for "tea enthusiast" counts.

His arguments and perspective don't reflect some sort of deep inner knowledge of social trends, or consumer interest shifts, but he seemed to make some decent points.  Really only that Reddit group is on that scale for high user or member count, although multiple tea groups including 25k members is something.  Youtube channels related to tea still haven't exactly blown up, and it's hard to get any feel for Instagram, since there are surely hundreds of tea enthusiasts there posting, but it's not clear how much change that's causing.  

I just moved to Honolulu, back to the States, and ran across two or three people online who are interested in tea, and a number more on the big island, Hawaii.  It's nothing like Bangkok interest levels, or Seattle or Portland.  Even Chinatown here barely sells any tea; it's strange.

To summarize what is probably already clear, his main point is that tea is seen as foreign oriented, as difficult to find and explore, and probably tricky to brew, but people aren't even getting that far.  He explored loose tea at a specialty grocery store at one point, but talked about now buying medium range--bad quality, basically--English tea as tea-bags.  As a tea enthusiast it's familiar how putting any leaves in hot water in a remotely appropriate proportion and time could make decent tea, but it's not really about that fact of the matter, more about perceptions.

Guesses about why tea really is about to take off

This direction is tougher, no better speculation than what my brother was saying, even with a decade of exposure and continual discussion to draw on.  None of the conventional references or data seems to clearly define plausible causes for why this trickle of increasing demand would ever increase faster.  Something not currently happening would seemingly need to happen.  I doubt that it will, in the next decade, but I think it will at some point, when the conditions are right for it.

Beyond that skeptical take, that specialty tea just isn't something Americans are likely to take up in large numbers, then it's also clear enough that the early ventures into boxed tea-bag products has led to increase in offerings and sales in that range, that even at the low quality end tea interest may be diversifying.  It's not easy to see in the summarized table stats shown, but Unilever selling off their Lipton branch seems a potential indication of that.  Probably standard offerings like Lipton have suffered instead of benefitted from this diversification, even though it's as likely competition from a very broad range of other beverage choices that are impacting tea bag sales.  The plausible, but very uncertain, model for rapid increase looking forward is that earlier demand for Tazo teas, for a time switched over to Teavana brands, and now any number of others, could lead on further to higher quality specialty tea demand.

When though, and why not yet?  Up until 4 or 5 years ago we kept hearing from specialty tea interests that tea was really about to take off, or the process of that was already underway.  Sales stats always seemed a little underwhelming, the odd 10+% claim of annual growth, but anecdotal accounts always went with that, stories of new channels and forms, and spread of awareness.  Of course some vending businesses are very successful now, more so than was probably possible a decade ago, at least related to many formats.  Social media group and related app development all continue.

Maybe it's not yet clear why I have faith that tea awareness and interest probably will change, or how I place my own skepticism.  In order to shift people would have to take a fundamentally different approach to food.  Not all of them; I mean it would help if the general pattern shifted a little, since plenty of people span a broad range of ways of relating to food.  Many people must have moved on from fad diets, and instead of "throwing in the towel" and have moved on putting focus and energy into eating a basic, balanced diet.  Probably lots more still take a fad-theme approach, shifting from paleo influence to eliminating carbs, or intermittent fasting, and so on.  That could be fine, if any one approach is balanced and positive, but in general it seems the wrong direction to me, to sift through and adopt trends.  

Eating a simple, balanced diet based mostly on carbohydrates, with some limited meat, dairy, and eggs, and plenty of fruits and vegetables, would work well, without the input of the latest ideas or a guru's input.  Living in the US again brought up how expensive and problematic it is to do that; bulk goods that aren't healthy are cheap, but lots of forms of fruits and vegetables aren't.

That's not as off-topic as it might seem, related to this all really being about a specific beverage choice.  It's fine to drink water or juice, for a healthy beverage replacement for soda or beer, but tea takes a little more doing.  Not so much RTD tea or bubble tea, but brewing decent tea takes practice, and a limited degree of extra equipment.  Health concerns are one driving force for that, beyond curiosity about a new food experience, or some other interest in a foreign culture practice.  General approach to food also factors in.

This line of thought keeps switching back to supporting what my brother said better.  People taking up cooking is too problematic, and emphasizing optimum dietary input over food experience is too broad a shift.  I don't see most Americans as curious about foreign cultures, or really open to importing aspects of others.  That might seem a bit ironic, given the older "melting pot" theme, but that related to people already here sharing their own experience, not a more indirect or abstract import.  Thai food is well accepted; that's about where it typically begins and ends, related to that sort of scope.

The latest practice I'm checking out in relation to diet highlights just how far I've drifted from standard approach to diet, and behavior in general:  I'm on my second day of a fast, trying to take a four or five day break from eating or drinking anything but water.  I could write more about that separately, but it seems a clear enough parallel to show why outrageous and potentially beneficial diet practice on my part is probably coming way out of left field.  Putting tea leaves in hot water is different; it's not very hard, expensive, complicated to source, difficult to sort out in relation to options, and so on.  But good tea isn't going to turn up right there in a grocery store aisle.

Oddly this is a big part of what got me into tea:  that's exactly what happened, Thai oolong suddenly appeared in front of me in a grocery store aisle.  It's not so much better accepted here than in the US but it's definitely easier to find, for very moderate quality versions.  Thailand started producing significant amounts of Taiwanese style oolongs back in the 90s, per my understanding, so it was more likely to filter out into broad commercial availability.  I just bought quite good Hawaiian tea in Honolulu, which cost over $1 per gram, and required drawing on existing tea connections to find, asking people by message versus online search.  Even in the local health food store there, Down to Earth, tea just wasn't there, beyond a few standard form boxes of tea bags.

I will personally continue to try to make this shift happen, even though at this point it feels a bit like tilting at a windmill.  As an example I've long since written for a Quora Space about tea, Specialty Tea, which some people must have been exposed to, but in terms of feedback or significant online traffic which came to nothing.  I first wrote for a now-defunct food news online source many years ago, out towards a decade.  I'm not sure what the next attempt will look like but I'll keep going.  But why?

This is a main point:  I see better quality tea as a healthier, far more pleasant, and more interesting alternative to standard beverage choices.  Spreading the word is aimed at helping others.  A bit foolishly idealistic, right?  I should at least be trying to sell something.  I might be more effective in spreading ideas if I were, if commercial support was a part of it.  If that communication form ends up changing I'll mention it here, or if I see signs of this change coming, that I'm questioning will happen any time soon in this writing.

Lessons learned from tea business successes and failures

 

I'm not the most natural person to be writing on this topic, since I don't sell tea, or earn any income from writing about it, but as usual this topic came up in online conversation.  A few tea sales ventures that looked like they were definitely going to succeed ended up not working out, in spite of taking novel steps that poised their businesses to do so, and there are lessons to be learned from this. 

The main lesson, as I take it, which I communicated to an online friend developing a tea business, is to stick with it, to give the venture time to build up, and accept not making profits early on.  I think all of these examples of "failures" described here would have eventually been success stories if they had stuck with it.  Let's see though, by examining those cases, with the obvious limitation that I'm guessing about why these businesses didn't succeed in time to continue.  The vendors didn't tell me the reasons, even though I did talk to two of them a little about that subject.

A few opposite examples of success stories are included at the end, not so much to contrast approach, but really just to show how similar approaches can work with either a bit more background work foundation or more time allowance to build up a business.

Temple Mountain Tea:  

This vendor made a great tea reference, a tea flavor wheel, so many years before the Australian Tea Master's group made their own quite good version.  It's this one:

Their last Facebook page post was in 2014, so they were there pretty early for this latest round of ramping up of specialty tea interest (much as that goes by distinct cycles).  Just for timeframe reference Phyll Sheng's blog (not his real name?) was active from 2006 to 2007, back when Marshal N was getting started in blogging, which I take to be one of the earliest online documented specialty tea interest "waves."  He posted some again in 2016 and 17.

We might speculate that they were starting early enough that uptake was limited.  I don't know though; maybe as awareness and demand ramps up vendor market entry does too, and maybe that was as good a time as any to get into vending.  The unique point here is that this vendor at least took time to make a great practical tea reference, and then later didn't keep on with tea vending.  They were probably busy doing something else; tea businesses are often set up as a side interest.

Tea Setter:

Again the theme here is that a vendor took a very promising and successful novel approach, only to see that not work out in terms of business longevity.  This vendor, a business owned by Matt Kitchen, reached out to the blogging community and was very well promoted by a lot of online posts back when they were active.  Here is an example, a Tea For Me Please post, or this one tops a Google search for the vendor name.  As the vendor name indicates they were promoting sales of teaware and also loose tea, with a shu pu'er being reviewed in that post (oddly not referenced as sheng or shu, but that can happen, especially back in 2013, before a standard list of details about versions became more customary).

So what went right, and wrong?  Tea theme issues or vendor mentions have always came and went in tea blog and tea group discussion circles, and this vendor was the talk of those right around then.  It seemed a great way to gain promotion.  Most of that talk was positive, with some reviews less positive about a shu version tasting a bit fishy, if I remember right.  I doubt that was any singular reason for this vendor dropping the theme (assuming they have, but the vendor name being Google-proof definitely implies that, beyond those reviews).  

I would guess that patience for the business to become profitable to a certain level was more of a concern, since tea demand would've been limited, as is still true today.

Lots of vendors across a broad time period have made good use of social media forms to promote awareness of their brand, I just don't remember any one of them generating this much positive buzz at one given time.  Tea related social media was more limited and consolidated back in 2013, so it would be hard to get the same proportion of online tea community attention today, for the forms and channels being a lot more diverse.  Bloggers seem to not have the influence that they once had, and my own blog gains far less readership than it did two or three years ago.

Tea Journeyman:

This example would be familiar to anyone active in online tea discussion at that time period (Kevin's review posts ran from 2013 to 2018, with the business active in a narrower window between those times).  It was a competent and well-developed blog, and a mature and well-formatted tea business attempt.  Kevin took training courses to support background knowledge, so he could've made some sort of sommelier / expert / master claim, but given how those tend to be received in the tea industry he mentioned that without overextending a related status claim.

My review of a Satemwa Malawai white tea version sold by the Tea Journeyman indicated that business had closed by 2015.  I had bought a Harendong Indonesian tea from him then too, which should indicate how trendy the vendor sources he was carrying was, since both were very well regarded.  Harendong must still make great tea, but again the buzz about new and interesting types, origins, and producer sources keeps changing over time, and those were "hot" back then.

Given how much I respected Kevin's blog content and his business approach I don't want to add too much speculation here about what parts worked and what didn't.  I'll cite his own 2018 explanation a little related to putting time into a tea interest and move on:

Yes, the tea reviews have been few and far between lately here. Life gets busy sometimes, and unfortunately taking time to prepare reviews is not always a priority.

I remembered there being more to that; maybe I was remembering a reference from his "about me" section as combined:

Other personal notes: I received my Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration and Accounting from Clarion University of Pennsylvania. I am a licensed agent/broker of property, casualty, life, accident, and health insurance in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey. I also hold the Certified Insurance Service Representative designation through the National Alliance for Insurance Education and Research, and earned the Certified Insurance Counselor designation in 2018 through the same organization. 

So he had career objectives to focus on around the time he stopped blogging, and maybe family or other obligations as well.  It may have been great for him if a tea business could've "blown up" in short order, but a recurring theme here is that it takes dedication, time, and a long view to make a tea business work.  He was really active from 2013 into early 2015 but it's still not long, probably less than two years of business attempt.

And that's already most of the story, about tea vendors who experienced interesting and positive successes, but not eventual business success.  I wanted to contrast those with three other vendors who have lasted through the long haul, very successful businesses, in order to guess at what differentiated them.

Yunnan Sourcing:

It's not really a fair comparison, referencing one of the most successful Western vendors there is. I think there is good insight into business perspective and developing a tea business background step by step in his Scott Wilson's example though.  This Tea Epicure post (surely formerly World of Tea) blog post by Tony Gebely tells part of that story:

...I came to Yunnan in 1998 and just fell in love with the place, especially the tea and the food. In 2004, I got fed up with being in the states and decided to pursue my dream of living in China and doing something with tea... 

We have a tea room in the Kunming Wholesale tea market. It is a place solely to drink tea. We have a library of more than 600 pu-erhs that are available to try! Our eBay store is our only online presence at the moment. Most business is conducted outside of eBay. In fact, individual customers with small orders can contact me directly and get at least 10% (or more) off the retail price. We will open yunnansourcing.com and yunnansourcing.us before the end of 2009. The latter site will feature products that will ship from the USA instead of China...

So Scott took five years to build a business from an onsite presence in a main Chinese tea market, up to an Ebay store, and then finally onto China and US based sales sites and businesses, only after that.  In writing about talking with an even earlier pioneer of tea sales, David Lee Hoffman, I cited a tea blog post that looks to include an image of Scott in that market in 2008, but it's not labeled as such.

Of course it's not really fair to go back and select one of the most successful tea vendors and then say a narrow set of inputs led to that success, when luck, or good timing, or any number of other factors could've came into play.  To me the success seemed to relate to putting the right work in, over time, but that's just a personal read on it.  In retrospect there was a gap in China based sales options that didn't extend to "the West." Moving to China is a bit extreme; of course I'm not implying that's the appropriate or essential level of commitment and input.

What Cha:

To me this is a positive success story, about a vendor starting out at almost exactly the same time as the Tea Setter and Tea Journeyman business, drawing on almost exactly the same business theme as the Tea Journeyman, probably matching products back then in many cases.  I'm pretty sure this vendor followed a pattern of carrying teas I reviewed not so long after I posted about them some years back, but really why not use blogger references as sourcing leads?

Their "about us" page adds detail about their theme:

I started What-Cha in 2014 with the goal of sharing my love of tea and it's incredible diversity and unique taste with others.  I wanted What-Cha to be different and unique from other tea stores and to serve both the tea producers and consumers.  To that end, I have tried to abide by the following principles:

Unique Sourcing:  It is my belief that too many companies rely on a small pool of wholesalers from whom to source their teas from. This is negative for consumers who find a lot of the tea stores selling identical teas to each other and a huge problem for tea producers who are forced to give large discounts to wholesalers due to their negotiating power derived from how much of the tea market they control.

This is why I have chosen to source all my teas direct from the producer where possible... 

This is exactly what Kevin Craig of the Tea Journeyman business was doing, and a founding principle for Tealet, and so on, a very common theme.  This makes perfect sense, only one step extended beyond producers venturing into selling tea directly.  Execution is everything; they made it work, which probably took a lot of doing.  For being based in Britain Brexit must have been something of a business nightmare for them, but they're still around, surely making adjustments as necessary.

Alistair, the owner, mentions a commitment to keeping pricing low in that vision summary; let's check that with a benchmark version, Jun Chiyabari teas from Nepal.

This What-Cha NEPAL JUN CHIYABARI 'HAND-ROLLED TIPPY' OOLONG TEA lists for 12 British pounds per 50 grams, now on sale for 10.80, which converts to $14.28 USD.  That is pretty good for that tea, or even the $15.86 cost prior to sale seems pretty fair.  

How can I really support that, that the value sounds good to me?  Another US vendor outlet (and favorite online contact / friend, their manager Peter) Trident Bookseller and Cafe lists what I would bet is a really exceptional Nepal black tea selling at a great value, so we can use that as a baseline:

Nepal Needles, Kanchenjungha tea estate in Eastern Nepal, $7.50 per ounce.

That works out to be just under $15 per 50 grams, since two ounces equates to 56.7 grams; roughly the same.  That Trident version:

I'm not sure that value necessarily means more in relation to business success than the many other factors that come into play:  branding, marketing, product range and quality, unique offerings versus standard product listings, active social media exposure versus just running ads, and so on.  Quality and value are relevant considerations for customers though.

Tea Mania:

This is a really interesting business example, and a vendor I've ordered tea from a few times, with an owner I've actually met (only once, if it matters).  Their sheng pu'er selection seems about as good a quality and value as anything in that range selling online.  Let's unpack their approach, background, and business theme a bit.

This is a Switzerland based online-only vendor, which started out as a Thai tea outlet.  That subject is pretty familiar; lots of people visit producers here and notice that pricing is quite low for wholesale level volumes.  His website shop looks pretty good; that part can't hurt.  Early on he was developing a Teapedia site, which still exists, and interesting endeavor that was really more about expressing his own interest and developing broad awareness than serving as a promotion tool.  

And this is where the standard business development story varies:  Peter Pocajt (the owner) went on sourcing trips in China and Japan to learn more about types and to expand his product range.  That's taking a long view, putting that kind of effort and expense in, but per my understanding his personal interest in tea allowed it to double as a vacation experience.  In discussing this business theme with him just a little he said the initial ramp-up was really slow, so patience also played a big part.  The business isn't a main revenue source, which led other business owners to let it drop once the return didn't come early, but Peter took that the other way, as a good reason to keep making changes and try harder.

A bit of an aside, some of the key red flags related to describing teas and marketing context are glaring in his product descriptions.  I'll focus on two:  almost all of his sheng are described as gushu material, and said to be produced by a local "tea master," Master Panda.  Ordinarily that's reason enough to not even try the products, since at least 9 out of 10 outlets exhibiting those warning signs are selling pretty random versions of teas, probably not really realizing which parts or those stories are true and which are made up.  Here's the thing though, if we set aside that problematic "master" designation if you go to Yunnan, as Peter did, you could meet people who are part of old tea traditions, who are very adept at making tea versions.  It's better to never include that one concept in claims, but it could translate over from something less loaded and unlikely to be nonsense from a Chinese language.

There is an interview post about Panda's background on Peter's site; he moved from another region in China to start making tea in 2004, and learned under the kind of teacher that might more naturally wear that kind of label, if it ever makes any sense.

Panda is on the right; I think I can guess that nickname origin

As an example about that "master" designation, a tangent within a tangent, my "family monk," who I lived with for over two months while ordained as a Thai monk, I have no real role definition for.  The concept "master" is probably the one that applies most, I just don't use it.  From there "teacher" is second best, but he never taught me all that much, because even though I lived with him and spent all my time with him back then, and try to visit often now, he never taught me that much, because of the language divide.  Someone else might just take the leap and say that's their Buddhist master, but I really think of him as extended family, as a beloved but slightly formal uncle.

a pandemic era temple visit; must've been a dip in exposure for an event to be held

10 years ago; he can't touch Kalani, for being female, but he always liked visiting with both

getting accustomed to Thai traditions while young

Back to Tea Mania, I don't know how the gushu / plant age / natural growth origin claims work out in relation to any of their teas (which they discuss a little in that interview; many aren't presented as that, instead as shengtai or arbor origin teas).  Maybe the origin type descriptions are just nonsense, almost entirely wrong, or maybe it's entirely accurate, and good local contacts are enabling buying pretty good, high demand tea material from modest demand local areas, without pushing on to the typical $1/gram final cost range.  Maybe the material is quite mixed; that's possible.  To me the teas are good, distinctive and clearly high in quality, which is the main thing. 

I can't distill their case to a "lessons learned" summary; I'm just describing parts of it.  It seems to me like sticking with it and escalating business effort and input instead of dropping it all in relation to early limited demand and profit return was the main key, but maybe that's not exactly right.

Related to one subject that keeps repeating here, to me an example of a current trial in progress for online exposure is represented by the vendor-specific Discord groups.  I'm registered to participate in two, hosted by Farmerleaf and Liquid Proust.  It's a little less straightforward than actively discussing tea in Tea Chat and Steepster, and sending bloggers some samples, but it might be a current effective approach, even though activity level at both of those seems moderate.  The running theme in this post was that there is no magic bullet though, that any one highly effective outreach tool can be very helpful, but all the conditions really need to come together, typically requiring support of extended time for positive business influences and consumer awareness to build up.

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.