Over the recent years, with the change of people's consumption and health concept, consumer interest for sugar free drinks has been heating up. Young people today tend to nurture their health in Buddhist-style. They’re willing to drink warm wolfberry tea as a health-nurturing practice, on the other hand, they refuse to give up hot pot, barbecue, snail rice noodle and other tempting goodies. Young people keeping good health in a punk way set off a wave of tea craze, and here comes out the "tea-like youth". Emerging as time requires, sugar free tea set becomes a blue sea market with huge potential. Nongfu Spring, with an keen insight into the industry trend, entered the sugar free beverage space as early as ten years ago.
Oriental Leaf debuted ten year ago. Featuring 0 sugar 0, calorie, 0 fat, 0 preservative and 0 artificial flavor, Oriental Leaf is extracted from original tea without any use of tea powder, flavoring, sugar or sugar substitute. It is simply made from tea and water. Tea lovers enjoy it bitter as if it were malt sugar, but for those who are used to drinking high sugar drinks, it is quite "bizarre". As a forerunner in sugar free tea drinking category, Oriental Leaf paid a lot for challenging the norm and became a target for nitzens to criticize from its taste to price. In 2016, Oriental Leaf ranked among the "top 5 most revolting drinks in China" that was widely spread on the web, and became "popular" in an unexpected way.
A decade on, Oriential Leaf never swerves from its original heart but people change their attitude. More people take to this tea product and those who once took a sip and threw it away later become big fans of Oriential Leaf. From a forerunner to a trendsetter, Oriential Leaf launches two new flavors ten years after its debut, that is, citrus reticulata Pu'er tea and brown rice tea. The packaging design of the two new launches keeps the classical illustration style of Oriental Leaf, interpreting tea stories with oriental aesthetics. The packaging inspiration of citrus reticulata Pu'er tea comes from Cha’an Tang, an ancient postal stand in Tea-horse Ancient Road built in the 13th year of Jiaqing to the 3rd year of Daoguang in the Qing Dynasty. Cha’an Tang is set up for transporting tribute for the emperor to the Forbidden City and sands as the gateway where Pu'er is transported to Yunnan. With steep slopes, high mountains, dangerous peaks as well as ancient trees towering to the skies, legend has it only cranes could fly out. Besides, Crane in traditional culture represents auspiciousness, longevity and nobility. Magnificent and fascinating, the image of a crane carrying a string of citruses conveys the deep connotation of Oriental Leaf as a Oriental tea, and the brown rice tea flavor chooses "carp streamer", a symbol of spring, as its key visual feature.
In terms of flavor profile, Oriental Leaf citrus reticulata Pu'er tea flavor is made with high-quality Pu'er tea fermented from the sun-dried green tea of Yunnan big leaf species, combined with Xinhui Citrus Peel from Guangdong province of China. The original tea is extracted with Nongfu Spring natural water, which restores the freshly brewed flavor to the greatest extent and delivers a mellow taste with a sweet and fresh aftertaste lasting long. The brown rice tea flavor takes Nongfu Spring northeast fragrant rice as raw material and is matched with Japanese steamed green tea. Aromas of fried rice and steamed sea sedge form a blend to reduce the bitter and astringent taste of tea, thus making the tea soup fresh and thick, a sweet sensation long after and no harm to the stomach. So this flavor is more suitable for catering scenario. Thanks to the cold-aseptic filling technology and cutting-edge process with patent, Oriental Leaf is capable of retaining tea aromas and delivering a natural tea flavor with no extra additives. After years of hard work and thousands of experiments, scientific researchers and frontline stuff have worked out a set of Tea Processing models, which is able to minimize the high-temperature heating time in the manufacturing process of tea beverage, reduce the chemical changes of chromogenic, aroma and taste substances in tea, and offer double security to retain the original tea color, aroma and flavor.
With ten years of deep expertise, Oriental Leaf has greatly enhanced its product strength and brand influence. Looking ahead, Oriental Leaf standing the test of the market will develop more rapidly. With Nongfu Spring’s aura as a pacesetter and the strong help of multi-core innovation in technology, product and brand, Oriental Leaf is expected to open a new world and bring new development opportunities to the great potential tea market.