Lunar New Year Boosts Tea Travel | Nepal Past Currency Crisis | Pakistan’s Tea Imports Spike

HEAR THE HEADLINES – Lunar New Year Will Boost Consumption and Tea Travel | Nepal Recovers from Foreign Currency Crisis | Pakistan’s Tea Import Spike (Legal and Smuggled)

| NEWSMAKER – Tao Wu, co-founder of Tao Tea Leaf, Toronto, Canada

| GUESTS - Annabel Kalmar, Tea Rebellion, Franco Li, Chin-Tea, Jean-Daniel Baki, Ryca Tea, Helen Kong, Secret Teatime, Luvinda Delwita, Robert Wilson's Ceylon Teas

| FEATURED – After two years of crisis management, tea professionals were eager to return to work, reviving tea tradeshows with vigor – but attracting large crowds of tea enthusiasts to the smaller venues common to city-wide tea festivals took longer. In 2023, tea festival goers remained timid. Audience counts did not immediately return to pre-pandemic highs. Locally based exhibitors, their reserves exhausted, operated with tight marketing budgets.

The Toronto Tea Festival that concluded Sunday marks a turning point in 2024 as the crowd surged from a 2020 low of 2,600 in February 2020 to 4,000 attendees - a 25% increase from previous highs. Joining us today to discuss the changing dynamics is Tao Wu, co-founder of Tao Tea Leaf and one of the festival's key organizers… but first, let’s listen to the excitement ON THE FLOOR at the weekend event.

Exhibitors Welcome Youthful Crowd - Tao Wu and his sister Mingzhou Gao (an accountant) co-founded Tao Tea Leaf 14 years ago, opening their first three tea shops on Yonge Street in downtown Toronto. The Mississauga store in the Square One shopping Center opened next. The latest shop opened in May 2022 at Union Station on the concourse directly under the Great Hall.

Wu said, "I noticed many young visitors this year among the local audience attending the show. They are really interested in asking the vendors questions and attending the workshop and Tea Tsunami. That's a good sign that the young generation is more interested in tea. We are trying to bring more tea-focused topics to the show. Also, as you can see, this year's vendors are mainly tea vendors. We still want to make the festival a really tea-focused tea festival."

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