A tea fit for British royalty has family roots in western Connecticut.
Founded by innkeeper John Harney at his Salisbury home in 1983, Harney & Sons Fine Teas remains family owned, and since 1998, has operated out of a plant in the Hudson Valley village of Millerton, N.Y., a few miles across the state border from Salisbury.
The New York Times once credited Harney, who died in 2014 at the age of 83, with helping to spark an upper-crust tea revival in U.S. hotels in the 1980s.
Harney & Sons tea is now served at places like the United Kingdom’s Historic Royal Palaces, which operates the Tower of London and several palaces, including Kensington Palace, home of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
To mark Queen Elizabeth II’s 70th year on the throne, Harney & Sons this year is blending a Platinum Jubilee tea, and sales are still doing well for its Diamond Jubilee variety from a decade ago.
Like other pantry staples, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked a surge in tea sales, according to separate estimates by Nielsen and Information Resources Inc.
Over the 12 months through mid-May 2021, IRI reported mass-channel sales of Fairfield’s Bigelow Tea rose 9 percent from the same stretch a year earlier, for a market-leading total of $227 million. That accounted for just over half of the total U.S. sales as calculated by IRI.
The Teas Association of the United States estimated that Americans drank 85 billion servings last year, including bottled sweet tea. The trade group says millennials represent the biggest demographic, with 87 percent drinking tea at least occasionally.
Harney & Sons is now doubling the size of a production line for bottled teas and has obtained a New York license to infuse some of its varieties with CBD from hemp grown at its Millerton facility.
Michael and Paul Harney now run the company their father started. CEO Michael Harney believes more people will start drinking tea regularly, either established company brands or emerging products like CBD blends.
“Tea is still a smaller player than coffee, right?” Harney said last week during a tour of the Millerton facility.
Harney & Sons imports its tea primarily from China and India. It creates its blends at the Dutchess County plant that employs about 200 people, while offering tastings at a tea room in downtown Millerton as well as a shop in lower Manhattan.
With hotels and cruise ships a significant source of revenue, Harney & Sons felt the squeeze during the 2020 crash of the travel market, before mass distribution of vaccines sparked a revival in leisure travel.
While Harney & Sons is now sold at Target and other mass retailers, Bigelow, Celestial Seasonings and other major brands had a head start for decades — or nearly a century in the case of Lipton.
“Bigelow is a much larger company than us and they’ve been around longer than us, and we respect them,” Harney said. “We were the smallest company around, and now we’ve gotten a little bigger.”
Harney & Sons recently acquired a canning line to produce a carbonated version of its Hot Cinnamon Spice tea. The company has also added a “mini shot” line of products, which have become increasingly popular driven by the success of energy drink companies.
Hot Cinnamon Spice remains Harney & Sons’ biggest seller, with a decaffeinated version No. 2 last year ahead of Earl Grey Supreme.
Harney’s personal favorite is oolong tea, which it sources from Fujian Province in China and Taiwan. Harney said imports have hit a snag in recent weeks as China deals with a new COVID surge impacting tea and packaging supplies.
But looking at the million pounds of tea stacked high on pallets at the Millerton plant, Harney said he thinks his company will have enough for now.
“We have enough tea for a while,” said Harney, who still lives in Salisbury. “The whole freight bill has become very serious, though.”
Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman