This is not tea

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This Is    NOT    Tea

Really NOT

Glückstee (Migros Lucky Tea)

At some point, Swiss food supermarket Migros truly upped the quality on their tea shelf and to their tea bags started to add Dilmah’s loose leaf series.

Dilmah was developed by Sri Lankan Merrill J. Fernando and the brand is currently listed among the 10 biggest in the world. One of the company purposes was to level up multi-origin blended supermarket offers by single-origin tea directly packed at source (https://www.dilmahtea.com/dilmah-family/dilmah-story).

The company thrives well and now not only offers tea (Dilmah Tea Shop here: https://shop.dilmahtea.com/collections/dilmah-exceptionals-teas), cinnamon (45% of Sri Lanka’s cinnamon is exported to Mexico, this interesting statistic here reveals https://www.seylany.com/en/cinnamon-export-statistics-from-sri-lanka-to-the-world-in-2023/), but they also offer luxury tea holidays on their estates (https://www.dilmahtea.com/dilmah-family/leisure-hospitality)

<--  Tea shop, left

Luxury tea holiday, right –>

What strategy Migros pursue is less clear. The Dilmah brand appears to have disappeared and a Glückstee (Lucky Tea / Good Luck Tea) has made its entrance.

Imprinted by Lipton tea (Sir Lipton partnered with Taylor in Sri Lanka, in the wake of the industrial revolution made tea available to the masses, and he improved the design of the tea bag with his flo-through concept), the Swiss tend to assume that anything served in a tea bag is tea. This is clearly wrong, but the Swiss belief is nonetheless steadfast. From a professional point of view (as discussed here https://www.theswissteasommelier.ch/camellia-sinensis/, and here https://www.theswissteasommelier.ch/tea-tea-and-tea/, and here https://www.theswissteasommelier.ch/sensational-tea-videos/), tea is made from a sub-variety of a plant called Camellia Sinensis. The tea bag has a right of existence (See here https://www.theswissteasommelier.ch/which-tea-bag/), but tea from tea bags tends to be of lower quality.

Real and good tea comes from the Camellia Sinensis. Glückstee is made from

  • Savory (Bohnenkraut), clearly not tea
  • Hemp (Hanf), clearly not tea
  • Lemon verbena (Zitronenverbene), clearly not tea
  • Parsley (Peterli), clearly not tea
  • Apple mint (Apfelminze), clearly not tea
  • Rose petals (Rosenblüte), clearly not tea
  • Citric acid (Citronensäure), clearly not tea
  • Sugar (Zucker), clearly not tea

This is clearly not tea. It does not even contain a miniscule trace of tea. To add insult to injury, even Copilot does a better job in its conclusion on Glückstee:

The Swiss food industry excels at exploiting a law that (admittedly somewhat loosely interpreted) seems to protect whatever fibs make a product attractive on the front – as long as the full truth is spelt out in miniscule print on the back.

As an example, the colourful attractive front of breakfast cereals may tempt the customer with an over-sized logo that points out that the cereals in question contain vitamins, and this is fine according to law as long as the trace amounts of these vitamins and the heaps of sugar contained in the same product can be found in the ingredients list on the back.

Thus, in the difficult to read ingredients list of Glückstee, we find that the weight of the dry extract is 1.2g per litre, and that Glückstee contains 56g of sugar per litre (the equivalent of 3-4 cubes of sugar per glass – when did you last prepare a cup of tea and added this much sugar ??).

Wherein, then, it must be asked, does the luck contain ? Is it that Migros count themselves lucky that people buy this drink and this is what led to its name ?

The ingredients list almost makes a point of highlighting that the ingredients are organic. A closer look shows that the savory is organic and from abroad, the hemp is organic and from abroad, the verbena is organic and from abroad, the parsley is organic and from abroad, the mint is organic and from abroad, the rose petals are organic and from abroad, the citric acid is organic and from abroad – the SUGAR, and there is lots in it, is organic and from abroad, or organic and from Switzerland, or a mix of both.

In addition to all this, if you are thinking that the Migros lawyers possibly don’t know that this is not tea, another look at the ingredients list will prove otherwise. While the front of the bottle uses the word ‘tea’ twice, the back legally correctly states “Infusion made from herbs”.

With this in mind, the reader of this page is now in the position to make a well-educated guess wherein the luck of Migros Bio Glückstee consists ;-)