Thoughts about Teforia's demise

As of today, Teforia no longer is in business or selling its products.* Teforia produced the highly celebrated tea making system ("Teforia Selective Infusion Profile System") that took the guesswork out of tea brewing, making it "easy," and produced a "perfect" cup of tea every time. According to World Tea News: 

"At World Tea Expo, Teforia was awarded 2016 Best Tea Industry Innovation Award and was named the 2017 Best (Electric) Tea Brewing Device. The innovative brewer, initially priced at more than $1,000, adjusted steep time, agitation, and temperature for premeasured [loose] tea in capsules sold online as Sips. These premium teas, from established growers such as Yamamotoyama in Japan, were delivered by subscription as fully recyclable and 90 percent compostable. The classic brewer could be programmed by smartphone to brew any tea."**

The Teforia Selective Infusion Profile System. Image from teforia.com  

The article in World Tea News cited four lessons to consider from this failure:

• Raising large VC rounds is no guarantee of future business success.
• Good product design is always a big driver for consumer adoption, but the underlying business fundamentals need to be sound for the venture to succeed.
• High-priced hardware appeals to early adopters and is critical in recouping development costs, but the number of early adopters, while influential, is always small. Pricing devices that people can afford, while balancing margins on the business side is essential to achieve scale.
• A closed ecosystem such as Teforia, Keurig and Nespresso can work to generate sustaining cash flow, but that’s assuming the consumables they are offering are unique and right-priced. Investors have pulled back from several similar beverage proposals.

What fascinates me is that they mention that the Teforia system is analogous to the Keurig and the Nespresso systems. Both of these systems make their coffee from premade, predosed containers to give you something simple, quick, with no thinking involved. In other words, coffee-on-the-go for people who don't have the time or perhaps even the desire to savor. There is nothing exquisite about these brews, but they serve their purpose.***

The price tag of Teforia was pretty stiff for the convenience of drinking tea as you might coffee: simple, quick, with no thinking involved—you can do as well with a tea sachet or a bottled tea, if you just want a cup of tea to go. 

The goals of the Teforia system, though, were to automate and make fool-proof the brewing of high-end teas, so the flavor would be perfect every time. Which it was.

Yet those of you who appreciate high-end teas will quickly say that the joys of sipping an exquisite tea lie in looking for and selecting the tea, in the aesthetics of pots, cups, and utensils, and especially in the ritual of the brewing process itself, not to mention in the surprise of tasting the results—no two brews are exactly alike, nor should they be.

So I believe that we should add to the four lessons laid out in World Tea News a fifth lesson, namely that preparing a cup of delicious tea is as much an art as a science, and requires a human hand and mind at every step of the way. Taking the human touch out of the process may yield a great flavor but not a great joy. 

* Here's a video of the Teforia system in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixqM77riEOo
** http://worldteanews.com/news/teforia-closes-down
*** I'm working on a coffee book to go with my "Three Basic Teas & How to Enjoy Them," so have been diving deep into understanding coffee. By virtue of coffee's chemistry, the Keurig and Nespresso systems simply cannot give you a delicious coffee that you could savor the way you would savor tea.