The “China Recall Crisis”
Monday November 19th 2007, 5:17 pmFiled under: General
As importers of organic Chinese whole leaf tea and artisanal tea-ware, few things could slow us down more than a “Chinese food poison” crisis, as well as lead contamination in manufactured Chinese products. Here we are, trying to convince people that green tea is the greatest thing since sliced bread, full of untold health benefits, and that our teapots are totally lead free…
So American consumers are experiencing a crisis in confidence in Chinese products just as we are getting our tea into major grocery stores, and our tea-ware is gaining traction online. Since I have personally sourced our tea and tea-ware in China over the past four years, travelling to tea farms and teapot manufactories, I have seen first hand every kind of shinanegan imaginable, with every explanation under the sun for discrepencies, contract violations, etc. So, from the start my goal was to bring in products only from people I could trust, who had provided a consistently high-quality product and no ”playing games”. And this was before the current string of Chinese manufacturing scandals…
I was doing a demo at a certain major organic grocery store the other day, and found myself wondering at the shift in consumer awareness over Chinese products. Talking with customers at the same location before this summer, no-one had any problem with organic Chiense tea and lead-free tea-ware. Suddenly now, everyone is an expert, and nearly all of the conversation with people stopping by to taste the tea was not questions of health benefits (note: these statements have not been approved by the FDA…our usual mantra), or even taste, but rather the very justifiable concern over food contamination and reliability. It seemed everyone was bent on buying products from anywhere BUT China, although they conveniently overlook the fact that almost everything is made in China!
So, for the duration of the demo, my partner and I clearly and thoughtfully answered every question, emphasizing that our organic certification was from a Swiss company that personally inspects the tea fields and packing facilities, and that our tea-ware is certified lead free–besides, our tea-ware is unglazed, so there is no need for lead in the first place! I found that by engaging with them one by one, answering the same questions over and over, while plying them with delicious tea samples prepared gong-fu style as we were talking, the customers responded to our forthrightness, and the crowd around our table remained strong for all six hours of the demo! In the end, we ended up moving over 1/3 of the stock of tea we had sold to the store, as customers were able to get the answers they were looking for in an honest and straightforward manner, and then relax enough to see that the product really was incredible after all.
If Western companies would just do the hard work with QC and really know the source and nature of their products in the first place, none of this “crisis” would have happened. Because we knew about the origin and nature of our products, with no shady assurances or murky explanations, we were able to weather the crisis in good order. We know where every single product comes from, we know there are no sub-contractors, middlemen, or sketchy deals just to save a penny. Our costs are low enough in the first place that we don’t have to cheat to save another penny. If only everybody else saw it that way…
In my day, sourcing all kinds of products for other companies, I have seen every kind and quality of Chinese factory imaginable, from places with thousands of workers and dorm facilities like small cities, all the way to 2-person hand-crafting operations in a barn in the middle of the countryside. I know from first-hand experience when something looks to good to be true, and by sticking to my guns and trusting my instinct, I have avoided situations that would have compromised our integrity and threatened our reputation with our customer base. In fact, we even stopped carrying most kinds of pu’er tea a year ago in response to Taiwanese newspaper articles that criticized current pu’er manufacturing techniques. So we did a voluntary “recall”, traded tea with customers who bought the stuff, and stopped carrying anything we weren’t 100% positive couldn’t have been made improperly.
Our customers appreciated that honesty at the time…and all the more so now.
