Sri Lanka’s plantation ministry to build about 30 tea outlets for local market

Oct 02, 2015 (LBO) – Sri Lanka's plantation ministry is planning to build 20 – 30 tea houses around Sri Lanka to sell export quality tea to local market who drinks dust tea being a nation of tea growers. “We have spoken about a concept that we wanted to introduced to the tea board,” Navin Dissanayake, minister of plantation industry said “Although we export pure Ceylon tea Sri Lankan here do not get the benefit of drinking the good quality tea.” He was responding to a question asked by a reporter is to why the local consumers do not get quality tea products and gets only the “dust”. In the tea industry, tea leaf grading is the process of evaluating products based on the quality and condition of the tea leaves themselves. The highest grades are referred to as "orange pekoe", and the lowest as "fannings" or "dust". Sri Lanka is popular for its pure Ceylon tea in the world market. “We have few plans but not exactly a final one. We are looking at option to get Tea board directly involved or to have another company floated with the equity of tea board and to have some very good tea outlets,” Dissanayake said. “So that people can enjoy the benefit of pure Ceylon tea. That is something I really want to do nor I do not want to have something like the tea shop that they have put near the sport ministry which is a colossal lost,” “But definitely we will study a new model where the most popular towns in Sri Lanka, the cities to have these outlets where foreigners and local to come and enjoy a good cup of pure Ceylon tea. But it is not an extravagant exercise,” “It will be based on a market and profit model where we do not keep dumping state money into it,” “May be the tea board can have an equity on that and some 2-3 investors can come on board.”