A wholesaler in Mumbai’s tea market.

Society Tea is the packaged brand of Hasmukhrai & Co., a family tea business in Mumbai whose roots lie in Masjid Bunder, the district around the city’s old tea market — the street known as Chai Galli. Its early history comes from the family itself, and the two versions it has given do not quite match, so we set out both.

In interviews published in 2018 and 2019 by The Hindu, ETBrandEquity and Adgully, the fourth-generation director Karan Shah said that his great-grandfather, Hiravan Pranjivandas, started as a tea wholesaler in Masjid Bunder in 1924. Traders came from across Maharashtra to buy tea there to sell locally, and the business also traded with countries in the Middle East. In 1933, wanting to sell to Mumbai’s own households, he opened Hasmukhrai & Co., with a first shop in Kalbadevi.

The company’s website now tells it differently. It names the founder as Amarshi Bhurabhai Shah, who, it says, went to Africa as a stowaway in his youth, came back to work in Bombay, and in 1915 started an export and wholesale tea business called Hiralal Pranjivandas at Masjid Bunder, selling mainly to Iran, Iraq and the Middle East. It says that shop is the only one of its era still trading in the market, and it agrees that Hasmukhrai & Co. came into existence in 1933.

By the late 1980s, the press accounts say, Hasmukhrai & Co. led Mumbai’s tea trade. The family then decided to sell packaged tea, judging that customers would come to prefer convenience to loose tea weighed out in shops. The brand was Society Tea. ETBrandEquity and Adgully date the launch to 1991, while the company’s website says the idea came in 1989 and the brand was launched in 1990. It sold first in Mumbai and then across Maharashtra. ETBrandEquity credited Karan’s father, Atul H. Shah, as the founder of the Society Tea brand. The name, Karan Shah told The Hindu, was meant to reach a wider range of ages and move tea away from the idea that it belonged to middle-aged and older people.

Blue, against the research.

The pack is the brand’s design story. ETBrandEquity reported in January 2018 that when Society Tea was being launched, market research said its packaging should be red, green or yellow. Atul Shah ignored it and made the pack blue, because the shelf was already crowded with reds and greens and he wanted the new brand to stand out. The same piece set Society beside Gujarat’s Wagh Bakri — “very red,” it said — as a regional brand that had held off national rivals. “Consumers immediately recall Society Tea because of the distinct recall value of our blue kettle and cups,” Karan Shah told Adgully in 2018.

The company also claims firsts in packaging materials. Its website says it was a pioneer in using triple-laminated foil packs and later the PET jar; we give those as its claims.

The brand has avoided celebrity endorsers. In 2019 ETBrandEquity headlined its interview “Chai over celebrity endorsements,” and Karan Shah told Adgully that Society Tea had never signed a brand ambassador, partly because three family members work full time as tea tasters and the company cannot match rivals’ media budgets. Most of its advertising budget goes to offline formats such as outdoor, ETBrandEquity reported. One of its first advertisements used music by A. R. Rahman, ETBrandEquity reported, and in 2017 the company commissioned “Sounds of Society,” a web series that brought musicians together; the project still features on its website.

In 2018 it ran “The Tea Society Called India,” a documentary-style campaign of photographs and film of tea drinking across the country, from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. The photographs were by Palani Mohan, a Hong Kong-based photographer, and Rakesh Haridas; the campaign was conceived by Sukumar Menon of BlackSwanLife, and the film was directed by Sachin Pillai of Epitome. According to ETBrandEquity, it won the award for best out-of-home campaign at the 2018 Kyoorius Creative Awards and two Blue Elephant awards, and prints from the series were later offered for sale, with buyers able to give the proceeds to one of four partner charities.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all sell tea, and they come from five countries: Taj Mahal Tea and Society Tea from India, Akbar and Mlesna from Sri Lanka, Betjeman & Barton from France, Hälssen & Lyon from Germany, and Nordqvist from Finland. Two of those countries grow tea on a large scale; the other three do not, so the tea sold under a brand from there was grown somewhere else.

That split makes the usual questions sharper. For a brand from a growing country, the label may promise a garden, a region or a national style of tea; for one from a country that grows none, the promise rests on the blend, the flavouring, the shop and the box. In both cases the name on the front and the place where the tea was grown, blended and packed can be several countries apart.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started it, who owns it now, where its leaf is bought and where its tea is actually blended and packed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Blended in Sanjan, sold beyond Maharashtra.

The company’s website names the brand owner as Hasmukhrai and Co., based in Bhiwandi, near Mumbai, and lists two manufacturing units in Gujarat, both run by Amar Tea Pvt. Ltd. — the business whose proprietor ETBrandEquity identified as Atul Shah. Tea storage, blending and packing, the company says, take place at a factory in Sanjan, in Valsad district, which it describes as fully automated, from incoming sacks tagged with RFID labels to cranes, conveyors and packing machines. It says its teas come “mainly from Assam and the Nilgiris.” A second unit near Vadodara, set up in 2014 as Amar Foods & Beverages, makes milk powders and instant tea. These are the company’s descriptions of its own plants.

The range has grown beyond loose leaf. Alongside the original Society Leaf Tea and dust teas, the website sells Society Masala Tea, an elaichi-adrak (cardamom and ginger) blend, green and flavoured teas, tea bags and One Minute Tea, an instant premix, plus a Hasmukhrai-branded CTC leaf. It also sells pickles and chutneys under the name Spice Secrets, instant coffee and skimmed milk powder.

The business remains in the family. Karan Shah, a director responsible for new products and marketing, told The Hindu in 2018 that he was the fourth generation, and the website says the legacy “is being carried forward by the 4th generation of Shahs.” In 2019 Karan Shah told ETBrandEquity that Society held around 40 per cent of packaged tea sales in Maharashtra, a figure we give as his. Beyond its home state, English Wikipedia and Adgully list Goa, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, and the company’s website lists Indian grocery stores across the United States that stock it.

For a design guide, Society Tea shows how one decision on colour, made against the research, can carry a regional brand for three decades. Compare Yorkshire Tea, another family-owned blend built on a home region, and Barry’s Tea, the Cork family blender. For this guide we use blue, navy and chai brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Society Tea’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.