Tea has a millennia-long history, but you’d be wrong if you thought it was steeped in tradition.

Tea is an old beverage. When we brew a fresh batch of new harvest tea, it’s easy to forget that the legend of Shennong’s discovery of tea spans back some 5,000 years, before the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed in Egypt.

Consider also that the oldest tea tree alive today, located in Yunnan province, China, is reportedly about 1,300 years old, which means it was alive at the time of the Viking Age.

But tea is not as fixed in tradition as you might assume given its lineage. Throughout millennia, tea growing, harvesting and production have been refined and brewing techniques have changed. New tea styles and cultural movements have emerged. Turns out tea is an ancient beverage with innovation at its core. So how does a 5,000-year-old beverage transform itself for the modern age?

For Brendon Collins, manager of Arakai Estate (pictured above) innovation in the tea growing, harvesting and production process was part of a broader learning curve. Arakai, which also grows avocados, ginger, and native timber, sought to diversify its crops, and started with some tea plants. However, the only ones available were Japanese cultivars, and the Collins family knew that a fair volume of Japanese style green tea was already being made in Australia.

“We took a bit of a punt to do something very different with those tea varieties and make them into something that potentially hasn’t really even been done before,” says Collins. The resulting product is the culmination of a series of challenges being addressed. “There wasn’t really anyone to talk to for doing what we wanted to do. There’s just an immediate problem that you have to have to solve.”

In the case of East Forged, which developed a nitro cold-brewed tea for more sophisticated palates, it was about identifying and addressing the gap it saw in the market. East Forged co-founder Kym Cooper described the product as “an adult-tasting beverage designed to be socially inclusive – the magic is it looks deceptively like a beer.”

The nitro tea comes in fruit flavours but is tea forward in taste and, crucially, low in sugar unlike other iced teas on the market. And while Cooper and her business partner Tania Stacey are rarely short of ideas, innovation is ultimately about tethering those ideas to what the market wants. “You need to couple [ideas] with this process of continuing to talk to customers, receiving their feedback, iterating on your own ideas. That’s how you build continuous innovation into your business model.”

It’s this value-add process that Becky Nary-Dart sees as crucial to her business. Developed out of one of Australia’s biggest bamboo forests, Big Heart Bamboo sells culinary bamboo shoots, condiments and bamboo leaf tisanes. But because of the versatility of bamboo, its potential – for construction materials or textiles, for example – was expansive.

“There is no rule book for how to manufacture bamboo in Australia,” says Nary-Dart. “As a business owner, your mind’s always going over new products: What can you do with this? What can you do with that? [Innovation is] thinking outside the box and testing that against the market constantly.”

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 17 September 2021. Mailchimp no longer allows external links to the original newsletter.