Starting today, and every Monday for the next 5 weeks, we will be introducing a new variety of Just Ice Tea (6 varieties for the launch).
When deciding on our final launch varieties, we have done our best to take into account hundreds of requests from loyal Honest Tea fans who are super-passionate about their bottled tea. And while none of our recipes is exactly the same as the Honest formulations, they will be recognizable and we think, even more tasty. As the saying goes, (inaccurately attributed to Mark Twain) “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Given the mutual commitment to using real tea leaves, Organic and Fair Trade ingredients, and Just Sweet Enough recipes, we expect Just Ice Tea to “rhyme” with Honest Tea.
First, a bit more about our new bottled tea line. As you can see from the image below, we have chosen to package our tea in a 16-ounce glass bottle – the same bottle that we used in 1998 when we launched Honest Tea and continued to use for two decades. We think a chilled glass bottle delivers the ideal sensory taste experience. And while no package is perfect, glass is 100% recyclable and can be endlessly recycled without breaking down into microplastics. The downside of glass is that it is heavy, breakable and not recycled in every U.S. municipality.
While Just Ice Tea will be similar, there will be a few differences with Honest:
- No cane sugar. When we use sweeteners, it will be either Fair Trade Certified™ Organic honey or Fair Trade Certified™ Organic agave nectar.
- Glass bottles only, at least for now. We may explore other sustainable packaging options down the road.
- Slightly less sweet.
- Chef-crafted. With a world-class chef as a co-founder, we couldn’t resist letting Spike Mendelsohn inject some creative extra flavor notes into our recipes.
The first variety we are introducing is our unsweetened Original Green Tea. It’s hard to make a bottled tea any simpler – the ingredients are filtered water, Organic Fair Trade Certified™ green tea, and organic citric acid and ascorbic acid (to protect taste). No flavoring (except the tea leaves) and no sweetener - Just the clean taste of real brewed green tea. This is definitely a Tea Lovers tea – and while newcomers may find the taste Not Sweet Enough, the purists often can’t get enough. This particular brew includes a shout-out to my friend Meg, who is a 2X a day bottled green tea drinker and nearly had a panic attack when she found out Honest Tea was being discontinued. The last 5 digits of the UPC code for Original Green Tea are Meg’s birthday!