Turning tea into dollars

Some people do yoga to relax. Susan Ho bakes. It’s been that way since she was a child.

“I remember when I was really young… mixing ingredients together. I didn’t know whether it would taste good or bad, but it was always fun,” Ho says. Later, she entertained friends with culinary delights she brought to potlucks.

As the founder of Tea Aura Inc., these days Ho, 34, is often in a kitchen, whipping up innovative, mouth-watering baked goods.

Her Toronto-based company creates shortbread cookies infused with tea flavours, such as Rooibos Chai, Earl Grey or Chocolate Mint. The company’s tea leaf-shaped cookies are carried by 215 Canadian and 20 American boutiques.

While baking with tea is rare in North America, when Ho visits Taiwan, where her mother is from, she frequently sees tea-infused cakes, cookies and candy. She didn’t know of anyone baking a similar product in North America. She began to wonder, “Why don’t I?”

Before launching Tea Aura, Ho – who has a nutrition diploma from Centennial College – worked as a hospital research nutritionist. Moving to self-employment went smoothly, thanks in part to Ho’s participation in several programs that provide advice to budding entrepreneurs.

In 2007, Ho applied to the Ontario Self-Employment Benefit Program, which offers business classes, for help developing a business plan and support from a mentor. When Ho joined the program, she initially planned to open a tea shop where she would sell tea-flavoured cookies. While developing her business plan, she realized setting up a tea shop would require a large amount of capital. She switched her focus to starting a tea-flavoured cookie business, which had lower startup costs.

Ho brought her revised business plan to Enterprise Toronto, which provides free business plan consultations. A consultant suggested Ho contact the Toronto Food Business Incubator, a non-profit organization that runs a shared commercial kitchen for entrepreneurs. By April 2008, Ho was in the incubator’s kitchen twice a week developing recipes.

The Toronto Food Business Incubator, which has a table at the St. Lawrence Market where clients can sell their wares, also gave Ho a chance to test her products. In July 2008, a month before Tea Aura launched, Ho spent several Saturdays at the market selling her cookies.

“That was a confidence booster for me,” she says, “to see that people actually like my product and that people will actually pay for it.”

When it came to branding, Ho and her husband Charles Wu – Wu is a partner in the business and has an MBA from the Schulich School of Business – decided to position Tea Aura’s cookies as a high-end product. “You sit back with a cup of tea and relax with it rather than rushing out the door and grabbing a cookie,” Ho says.

The company’s cookies feature top-notch ingredients. For the lavender currant cookie, the lavender comes from Provence. The Matcha Green Tea that flavours another is imported from Japan. Every cookie is made with Ontario pure butter.

Ho and Wu wanted the packaging to reflect the luxurious nature of Tea Aura’s products. Tea Aura’s cookies come in a tin, which retails for $9, and two different size bags ($3 for the smaller bag, $7 for the larger one). Each features elegant writing and sophisticated design.

The cookies’ flavours and packaging appealed to retailers on both sides of the border. At first, Wu and Ho did all the sales and distribution themselves. Within a year, 50 stores carried Tea Aura products. Last fall they began to work with a Canadian distributor who quickly brought the number of stores that carry Tea Aura’s products to nearly 240, which helped the young business become profitable.

Tea Aura’s products are still made in the Toronto Food Business Incubator’s kitchen, where Ho rents space three days a week. Ho and Wu fill small orders themselves but for larger orders call on up to 10 part-time staff.

“We would love to be able to get into our own kitchen but financially, it would be a really big burden on us,” Ho says.

But there may come a time when the incubator kitchen is not big enough. Tea Aura is in talks with brokers interested in bringing the line to Europe and Japan. If Tea Aura secures overseas distribution the increased demand may eventually lead the company to set up its own kitchen.

The small company is thinking big regarding its product line, too. In the future, Ho hopes Tea Aura’s products will include savoury tea-flavoured chips, tofu and sauces. “Tea can go into anything,” she says.


From Toronto Star By TANNIS TOOHEY



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