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It
was the quality of tea which
first brought Lyons to public
notice at the early exhibitions.
So successful was the tea they
offered that Lyons decided to
blend and pack tea themselves
from a small department in the
newly acquired Cadby Hall. The
earliest record of tea packing
goes back to 1895 soon after the
first teashops were opened and
these of course gave a ready
outlet for their own blend.
Initially composed of no more
than a half dozen staff the Tea
Department became one of the
largest and profitable
departments of the company. Year
on year the blending operation
grew so that by 1920 a completely
new factory had to be built to
satisfy the growing demand. Tea
in chests (and coffee bean in
bags) was unloaded from
freighters into barges before
being towed up the Thames as far
a Brentford Lock and thence by
canal to Greenford Dock. Here
customs would check the cargo and
duties were paid as the chests
were opened and used. Greenford
was an extremely large, efficient
operation with overhead conveyors
and its own railway system which
not only served Greenford but
connected to the Great Western
Railway network to take finished
product to markets across the
Kingdom. In order to have better
control of its raw material the
company bought tea plantations in
Nyasaland (now Malawi) but most
leaf tea came plantations in
India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)
but increasingly from other parts
of the world. Coffee too was
roasted and sold in air tight
containers and when the
technology became available
instant coffee supplemented this.
Lyons employed their own tea
blenders who controlled the
quality and purchasing of raw
material. The various tea blends
were all named after colours such
as, White Label, Red Label,
Yellow Label and Green Label. One
of the more prestigious labels
was Maison Lyons which was sold
exclusively in the food halls of
the Corner Houses. In 1918, to
increase market share in the
north of England, Lyons bought
the old established tea firm of
Horniman & Sons. They
operated from a factory in the
City of London and had a
considerable export business.
Black & Green of Manchester
was bought at the same time and
for the same reason. When the
Tetley Tea business was acquired
this made Lyons one of the
largest tea blenders in the
country and they dominated the
tea-bag market when this began to
develop after the Second World
War. From the Greenford tea and
coffee factory, Lyons also
produced a range of grocery
products such as cereals,
chocolate, candies, tomato sauce,
mayonnaise, custard powder and
liquid coffee concentrate. By the
1970s many of these subsidiary
products had been discontinued
and by the 1980s tea-bags were
outselling packet tea and this
too was eventually
dropped.
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