The first company in the world to wash and flash-freeze fresh-picked organic tea leaves will now see its trailblazing products in over 300 Loblaws stores across Canada.
The announcement this week puts New Brunswick start-up Millennia TEA into Canada’s largest grocery chain. It comes nearly one year after the company announced a similar retail partnership with grocery giant Sobeys and wellness retailer Whole Foods Canada.
Millennia TEA co-founder and CEO, Tracy Bell, says the Loblaws partnership is something that she and her team had been working toward for a long time.
“Loblaws is the biggest grocer in the country,” Bell told Huddle. “They’ve been on our radar and we’ve been doing the work to prepare ourselves to be able to meet the demand of a grocer of that size and support our accounts at several hundred new retail stores across the country.”
Millennia TEA also recently closed a seed investment round that will support expansion plans that include creating a frozen tea health booster.
It comes two years after another major investment round: a pre-seed round the company used to firm up its supply chain, bring a consistent, scalable product to market, and make its first hires.
Millennia will use its latest investment to grow its reach and reputation across Canada and launch into its first export market by end of this year.
There are also plans to expand its product line to include additional supports for energy, immune function, gut, and brain health. Those plans have doubled the company’s size in recent weeks, from four to eight employees.
Expanding in uncertain times
For Bell, it’s been an incredible journey–one that began with a health scare in her own family in 2016.
That scare prompted her and her husband/business partner, Rory, to discover the high levels of Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) in fresh tea leaves. EGCGs are antioxidants that are potent in helping neutralize free radicals.
“So we went looking for unprocessed, fresh tea,” Bell says in the company’s overview. “And when we couldn’t find it anywhere, we created it.”
They soon realized they had forged an entirely new category: fresh-leaf tea without any additives. It wasn’t long after that Millennia TEA began making the market’s first freshly frozen, un-processed tea plant product.
Millennia TEA products are now available at Loblaw-owned grocery stores across Canada, including Atlantic Superstore. (Image: Millennia TEA)
The company had plans to roll out into grocery store freezers just as the Covid-19 pandemic began. Bell and her team felt the impact immediately, as health food stores uncertain about the market halted orders for new products.
Bell says it was at that critical moment, in the weeks before the pandemic, that Millennia TEA had a product and a supply partner that had just received its first large shipment.
“We had a product that was consistent and could scale into all of Canada,” recalled Bell. “So we went to the biggest health show in Canada for the wellness industry for health products and got all kinds of interest and verbal ‘yeses’ from buyers at the grocery stores that we were targeting.”
Bell says that list included specialty and health food grocers with between five and 25 locations.
“And then I think it was three weeks later that the pandemic hit and the world shut down and all of those ‘yeses’ just disappeared, because nobody knew what was going to happen,” said Bell. “Everybody stopped bringing on new products, and so our pipeline dried up overnight.”
Coupled with supply chain challenges, Bell says she and her team kept working to get retail partners.
“Mass grocery stores, the big guys were seeing high traffic; the little guys were not sure how it was going and they were still not bringing on new products,” said Bell.
“But that was our journey during Covid. Fortunately, we have a product and, fortunately, during this pandemic people now care very much about their health in a way that maybe they had not taken the time to consider or contemplate previously.”
Bell maintains being able to deliver on that promise helped the business continue to grow during the last two, unpredictable years.
“I spent the past three years of our business working on myself as much as working on our value proposition to the marketplace. I believe wholeheartedly that if you’re bringing something of value into the world that does solve problems for people and adds value to their life–and you’re doing it from a good place–that there is a place for your contribution.”
Further recognition
Millennia TEA also learned this week it was selected as a finalist by the Retail Council of Canada for its 29th Annual Canadian Grand Prix New Product Awards. The awards represent the most impressive consumer products launched into the Canadian market in 2021.
Bell says Millennia TEA’s Superfood TEA Cubes were selected this year as a Non-Food Finalist in the Consumer-Packaged Goods category.
“It just continues to lend credibility to what we’re doing and what we’re building for our patented global innovation,” said Bell.
The winners will be announced at the Canadian Grand Prix New Product Award Gala on June 1.
Tyler Mclean is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
