Australia, your chai is ready! Stewart Dawes taps into Bondi Chai owner
MARTIN BUGGY about the growing acceptance of chai around the nation, and
where his brand fits into the picture ...
Not sure if it's the company I've been keeping lately, but I seem to have
been drinking a lot of chai. Went to the Yoga Expo at Sydney's Wharf 8, and
drank some chai. Went to a friend's afternoon tea, and chai was in the pot.
Ended up at the Mind Body Spirit festival, and drank even more chai. And
then, supposedly non-coincidentally, I'm in email-touch with a chai company
who send a batch of chai for me to taste. Their name? Bondi Chai. Where are
they from? Er ... Tasmania.
"We wanted a name that reflected the café lifestyle of fun, sun and good
times and there’s no better known icon of that genre anywhere in Australia
than Bondi Beach," says Martin Buggy on the phone from the Apple Isle.
"We also aim to take our product overseas – especially into South-East Asia
where we’ve already had interest – and we wanted the quintessential
Australian name to carry us into those markets. Ask any Japanese person
where Bondi is … and add all that to the fact that Bondi Chai just sounds
good and rolls nicely off the tongue and we knew we had the name."
While I've obviously ditched my hard-drinking journo friends recently for
the soft holistic types who I've been meeting at yoga expos - hell they
give far better massages and there's no puerile sniggering about happy
endings - I must admit to having been quite a novice in the chai-imbibing
department. I might have been seen as a bit of a hippy in the past, but my aspirations
were definitely bourgeois - the move to Sydney pre-Olympics being a defining
moment in the last seven years of my life. But chai had always looked pretty
feral to me, a perception the erudite Mr Buggy has brazenly tackled with the
promotion of the "chai latte", a smooth silky café-oriented beverage if ever
there was one!
"We believe we’ve uncovered a latent desire in Australians, and the Australian café
scene, for a warm, frothy drink with a great taste and silky smooth
mouth-feel," Martin says.
"Chai latte is probably the first genuinely new offering that cafes have
been able to give their customers in decades."
It's All About The Flavour
Bondi Chai's main two varieties, "Club Cinnamon" and "Vanilla Honey" do a
lot to challenge the myths about what chai is by virtue of their names alone.
"Club" sounds like something exclusive, evoking images of sultry exotic nights
where the cocktails just taste better thanks to an afternoon prep chai-latte-style.
Vanilla Honey sounds like one of James Bond's dames, so is this VH
more for the girls?
"We blended Vanilla Honey as an entry level chai latte," Mr Buggy admits,
"it's a milder, less spiced version for those unused to chai tea. We find
that people often begin drinking our VH and then graduate to Club Cinnamon
after a few weeks.
"You'll also find that other chai sellers in this country - the vast
majority of them imported from the USA - have done a similar thing, but
usually they use the names “spice” and “traditional”. But we found these terms
to be useless in a market that doesn’t even know what the word
chai means, much less what its traditional taste might be.
"We’ve found that there are so many variations of chai in India that it’s
difficult to describe what might be a traditional flavour anyway. We also
shied away from the term ‘spice’ for the confusion it could cause – “do you
mean spice as in curry - in a latte! Yuck! - or spice as in egg custard or a
sweet cinnamon bun?
"Vanilla Honey more closely describes the characterising ingredients in the
taste profile while Club Cinnamon aims to convey the strength of the
cinnamon flavour - which is enhanced by anise, not used in the VH."
When Style has a Health Factor
"We opted out of natural flavorings because of the health and quality
implications," Buggy continues. "I’m not sure if you’re familiar with where
cinnamon or clove comes from, but we’ve seen these spices harvested and
processed in Zanzibar and, trust me, you would not want to eat cinnamon
again if you saw what happens to it before it goes into a packet. Spices are
regarded as the ‘dirtiest’ food products available on the market and are
required to be irradiated before import into the USA.
"The look of cinnamon dust floating around in your beautiful latte froth is
also not good! And the quality of natural spices varies from season to
season and with the time of year. For all those reasons we instead went for
nature identical spices (clove, anise, cinnamon) which are derived from the
essential oils of the natural ingredient – all the flavour with none of the
above issues - some of which are imported from Germany because unfortunately
we can't source them in Australia.
"We also wanted to create a product with the simplest, closest to natural
ingredients list we could manufacture. We believe Bondi Chai has the least
number of ingredients in a chai latte anywhere - there are no chemical
additives, anti-caking agents, anti-oxidising agents, preservatives, etc.
"We have one ‘number’ (150C) on our ingredients list which is the caramel
colouring used and we’re currently investigating both its replacement and
gluten-free status.
From Focus-Groups To Financials
"We were able to develop our two taste profiles with extensive focus group
testings and we know that 98% of people who taste our product like it enough
to buy it - parting with money being the ultimate test," says Buggy
matter-of-factly.
"We've proved that stat so many times now we can quote it without fear of
contradiction – we regularly attend food shows - our next will be the Good
Food and Wine Show in Melbourne in June - where we sample out to thousands
of people so we know first-hand how people react. In fact, even we were
surprised at first at the extent to which our product was not just accepted
but actively sought after."
This has been great news for the domestic consumer, who can pick up a handy
250g bag of Club Cinnamon, take it home and within minutes of opening the
carton of milk or soy, be drinking a piping hot ultra-smooth glass of this
truly delectable product. But what about any food's ultimate litmus test:
the hard-nosed café or restaurant owner?
"Too many coffee shops we’ve spoken with are using what we believe to be
wrongly formulated chai offerings – they’re too traditional or spicy and
have largely been formulated in other countries where palates are obviously
different to those here in Oz," says Mr Buggy, who clearly has an answer to
everything!
"The result is that we speak with some café owners who say: “I’ve had a
bottle of that stuff here for months – no-one buys it” or “it doesn’t sell
mate, we’ve got this powder here and people buy one but they don’t come
back".
"Our response is always: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater – try
ours, promote it properly - we give plenty of sales support - and we’ll give
you your money back if you haven’t sold it in the first month.
"The result is that we launched Bondi Chai exactly 12 months ago after
spending eight months developing the taste profiles, we’ve sold to more than
600 cafes around Australia and have not yet had a request for a refund!"
The Hard Sell on the Soft Stuff
"Properly promoted, we're seeing Bondi Chai adding the equivalent amount of
up to 15% of gross coffee sales to cafes' cash registers each week. Put in
hard cash terms, a coffee shop doing 20kg of beans a week can expect to sell
at least 2kg of Bondi Chai a week which is 200 serves at an average of $4 a
serve which puts $800 into the till on top of coffee revenue as Bondi Chai does
not cannibalise coffee income. We don’t know of any café that
would knock that back!"
And the Big Picture?
Given the public’s permanent passion for ‘new’ things, does Mr Buggy believe
cafes have a real opportunity to ‘spice up’ their overall sales by promoting
this product as the next big thing in non-alcoholic leisure-time bevies?
"The fact that big coffee and tea consumer brands are now launching
supermarket brands of chai latte speaks volumes about where this product is
headed," Buggy reveals. “But chai’s greatest virtue - its subtle complexity –
is also its greatest vice in that the slightest tweak to the recipe creates big
differences in taste. One person’s chai can definitely be another person’s poison.
"That's why tastings are such an important part of our marketing and, luckily
for us, why one taste of Bondi Chai is usually all it takes to convert curiosity
into something approximating addiction.”
And a final wish for Bondi Chai market-share development during the rest of
2006? Buggy manages to sound sheepish for a moment.
"Well, we're yet to sell our product to any Bondi cafes!!!"
To order Bondi Chai for your cafe, bar or restaurant (or even for your
home) click on their website or contact them via the below details:
Ph: (03) 6331 7247 Fax: (03) 6333 0263
Email: sales@bondichai.com.au
