Sweet dessert-flavor teas will snatch my attention every time. This has, for both wonderful and disgraceful reasons.

The Wonderful: Tazo has a small line of enticing new black teas flavored with herbal blends so as to resemble assorted cookies and cakes. Having loved butterscotch-chip cookies as a kid, I grabbed this without hesitation. The dry-bag aroma was very pleasing, definitely cookie-like, but smelled more of the individual ingredients than the butterscotch taste: black tea, cocoa peel, licorice root, cinnamon (weak) and cardamom. I have no problem with any of those as flavors, and certainly not in this combination. The in-cup aroma leaned more "butterscotchey" and the taste is most of the way there. The cocoa still is quite readily discernible, but as a chocolate lover, I'm not put off in the least. Inadvertently, I let this cool to room temperature in a cold room, and it still tasted wonderful. This would make a delicious iced tea. "Butterscotch Blondie" was a superbly smooth, sweet, pleasant blend, just 2/5 on their caffeine scale for those sensitive to excess. I'd readily recommend this tea but for...

The Disgraceful: Tazo obeyed the letter of packaging rules, but definitely not the spirit. Comparing containers of flavored black teas side-by-side—this and their Earl Grey—the boxes are precisely the same length, width and height. The Earl Grey contains 20 bags, as prominently labeled with black ink on white background. The Blondie has 15 (1/4 fewer) bags for the same price, in the same-sized box. Why that wasted airspace and paperboard? The label, while accurate, is very nearly disguised on a chaotic brown/tan background consisting of a photo of the baked dessert—very hard for an even mildly visually impaired person to notice. Why do such a thing? In combination, this packaging and labeling strikes me as a deceptive practice, and thus deducts strongly from my "value"rating. I did see the "15" and reluctantly bought anyway, because I was confident I'd like the tea, even at that price point. I do...a lot. Regardless, the issue of misleading package size and camouflaged labeling has bothered me more since then, and out of principle, I'm not buying any more until Tazo fixes that.

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Comments:

Alex Zorach wrote: on February 23rd, 2018

I think it's good that you're drawing attention to this deceptive marketing tactic. And I do find it quite shady.

I actually have been thinking of this more, since you tweeted this at the RateTea twitter account earlier this morning, and the more I think about it, the more it seems shady.

For one, you're talking about "wasted airspace", so it's clear that these tea bags don't take up more space. In some cases, if a tea bag is filled with high-quality whole leaf tea with large leaves, loosely packed so it doesn't break, there can be a legitimate need to pack fewer bags into a box of the same size. And I understand that companies might want to keep the boxes the same size, so they could stack and pack neatly.

But it sounds like that's not what is going on here.

Also, there are times when it makes sense for the price of a tea to be higher. Again, this is usually the case with single-origin artisan teas, like black tea of high grade, tippy teas, single-harvest teas with precise timing, all sorts of other things that can make the tea more costly to produce.

This is rarely the case for flavored teas like this one. Not always, but usually, these teas actually use lower-quality, more inexpensive inngredients than their pure tea counterparts. The cost in producing them is primarily associated with developing the product, and then marketing it, and in the long-run the cost of production is usually low.

So...when I view this product through the lens of that knowledge, this looks very bad. It's not like they're pulling this stunt with a whole-leaf, single-origin tea, where it would be understandable both for practical and economic reasons. Ultra-sketchy!

Let's hope they hear your concerns.

Tchuggin' Okie wrote: on February 28th, 2018

Thanks for the support. If Tazo did just one of the four: put 20 "Blondies" in the same size box, clearly print "15" on white background as with the Earl Grey, keep 15 bags but in a commensurately smaller box, or a lower price for 15 flavored black tea bags instead of 20, this would be easier to pass off as a minor nuisance at most. The combination of all the little failings, however, leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the tea itself did not.

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