It was the
quality of tea which first brought Lyons
to public notice at the early exhibitions.
So successful was the tea they offered
that Lyons decided to blend and pack tea
themselves from a small department in the
newly acquired Cadby Hall. The earliest
record of tea packing goes back to 1895
soon after the first teashops were opened
and these of course gave a ready outlet
for their own blend. Initially composed of
no more than a half dozen staff the Tea
Department became one of the largest and
profitable departments of the company.
Year on year the blending operation grew
so that by 1920 a completely new factory
had to be built to satisfy the growing
demand. Tea in chests (and coffee bean in
bags) was unloaded from freighters into
barges before being towed up the Thames as
far a Brentford Lock and thence by canal
to Greenford Dock. Here customs would
check the cargo and duties were paid as
the chests were opened and used. Greenford
was an extremely large, efficient
operation with overhead conveyors and its
own railway system which not only served
Greenford but connected to the Great
Western Railway network to take finished
product to markets across the Kingdom. In
order to have better control of its raw
material the company bought tea
plantations in Nyasaland (now Malawi) but
most leaf tea came plantations in India
and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) but
increasingly from other parts of the
world. Coffee too was roasted and sold in
air tight containers and when the
technology became available instant coffee
supplemented this. Lyons employed their
own tea blenders who controlled the
quality and purchasing of raw material.
The various tea blends were all named
after colours such as, White Label, Red
Label, Yellow Label and Green Label. One
of the more prestigious labels was Maison
Lyons which was sold exclusively in the
food halls of the Corner Houses. In 1918,
to increase market share in the north of
England, Lyons bought the old established
tea firm of Horniman & Sons. They
operated from a factory in the City of
London and had a considerable export
business. Black & Green of Manchester
was bought at the same time and for the
same reason. When the Tetley Tea business
was acquired this made Lyons one of the
largest tea blenders in the country and
they dominated the tea-bag market when
this began to develop after the Second
World War. From the Greenford tea and
coffee factory, Lyons also produced a
range of grocery products such as cereals,
chocolate, candies, tomato sauce,
mayonnaise, custard powder and liquid
coffee concentrate. By the 1970s many of
these subsidiary products had been
discontinued and by the 1980s tea-bags
were outselling packet tea and this too
was eventually dropped. |
