4 posts tagged “chai”
I love Christmas in the UK, it has the same atmosphere as Eid back home. I hope Christmas this year is like this:
Christmas is a little weird being a small business, because although I personally feel that it has become very commercialised it should be the best sales period for us. Every company in the UK is pushing hard for sales; slashing prices, advertising like crazy and adding to the cheese factor of the season. The one piece of advice I would give every small business out there is to be prepared for this festive season. Make sure your supplies are in order and you have enough stock to see you through the holidays. Also work really hard, but have fun while you do it. Even though this will be the craziest period of the year, don't go crazy yourself and try to enjoy this great time. We have gotten into the spirit ourselves by introducing a ChaiChai Christmas Gift Hamper (yahoo).
Have a great Christmas and a happy New Year and let me know how you plan to spend your holidays. See you next year.
Hi Chai fans,
On the left there are ChaiChai's two products, Masala Chai and Chocolate Chai. The journey to bringing an organic tea company to fruition has been tough to say the least but seeing the products in their final form is a great feeling. 2 people spending all of their time to make it all work has finally produced something worth selling. Now the real question is will people buy it or not, well I'll keep you posted on how it all goes.
Talk to you soon.
I'm a very straightforward guy. If I think someone needs to hear something I let them know. I don't mind too much about the consequences of my actions, because in business I feel people need to hear the truth, always. I love it when people grill me as well. Me and Laura got grilled today, it was about our cost, our packaging and our brand. I take all the criticisms that people throw my way as positive (ok most of the time I do). There is something you can learn from everyone, and the problem I have is that people don't like it when criticisms are thrown in their direction. If you tell someone, 'maybe you should try this instead of that', they can very easily take it the wrong way.
I think the point I'm trying to make here is that the words you choose in speaking to people when in business count a hell of a lot more than some would think. I think a person in the food and drink industry (or in any industry for that matter) needs to be able to take a lot of abuse about their product and about themselves and then needs to adapt their style of talking to people who they deal with (abusing people back as I have learned doesn't always help, it may feel great, but doesn't help). A different tone and style of langauge needs to be adopted for your suppliers and a different one for your customers. Again it all comes back to the fact that business is not easy, no matter what country you live in. People are the same and have the same problems wherever you go. An entrepreneur's skill comes in the ability to deal with those problems (who knows if any of this makes sense, I sometimes just ramble on and on and on and ... you get the point).
Until next time, chai for now.
What makes a good cup of chai? Is it the ingredients, the way it is made or the skill of the person making it? The first time I made a cup of chai, it was dreadful. It was too watery, had too much spice mix in it and was basically undrinkable. Over time I got better, so much so that I feel that I can make a pretty mean cup of chai now, to even rival my grandmother's chai (who would probably clip me around the ear and tell me to keep practising). Me and my business partner Laura experimented with an old family recipe of chai that was floating around and added stuff to it, took stuff out of it and made it so that it would appeal to modern taste buds. We set up a little company around the recipe called ChaiChai and started making bags of chai to sell to people.
I feel and have felt for a long time that chai can only properly be made by being brewed on a stove. That is the only way you can get the true flavour of the tea leaves and the spices to fuse together to produce the wonderful and exotic chai taste. A lot of chai that is available on the market is in teabag form and that just doesn't work properly. The milk has to be brewed along with the tea and spices and cooked to produce the final drink, just as they do on the subcontinent. I am putting all this out there to find out what people have to say on this, maybe people make their own chai, it could be that people cannot wait for it to brew on a stove and prefer teabags or it could be that some hardcore fans of the drink (me included) only brew it on the stove and will not touch teabags. Let me know what you think about my blog or anything else about chai or even the big bad world of tea and let's see if we can get a discussion on the subject going.
Thanks and chai for now.
