The profitability of a cup of green tea

Buscar una alternativa al café para no abusar de él en las jornadas de trabajo. Eso fue lo que animó en 2013 a Pepe Cabestany y Víctor Abrines, socios y consejeros delegados de Matcha&Co, a planear esta start-up. Nacida en Barcelona en 2018, vende té verde y té matcha en polvo de Japón y, con estos productos, también elabora suplementos para el cuidado de la piel hechos en España. El confinamiento y la pandemia les han servido para multiplicar sus ventas por cinco. Una tendencia que no parece estancarse: prevén acabar este año con 2,2 millones de euros en ventas.

“We had closed the previous year with 171.000 euros and in 2020 we invoice 850.000 euros gross, 703.000 net ”, explains Abrines, which blames this success for consumption at home.Also to the way they reacted to be able to adapt to the moment, hiring two people.The exploitation result has gone from being negative (-73.000 euros in 2019) to achieve profits of more than 10.000 euros in 2020, who hope to grow this exercise.

The company, which is under the umbrella's umbrella, the business accelerator Juan Roig, owner of Mercadona, also sells other products “consumption and consumption”, such as aesthetics items that prepare two laboratories in Barcelona in Barcelona.Your next movement will be to launch a culinary line of creams made with tea.Today, 70% of its turnover comes from powdered tea and 30% of supplements, such as multivitamin probiotics and complexes.

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The time chosen to mount the company was a success.“In 2018 there was already Matcha's culture, there were brands selling the product.We were born with a commercial strategy that relied on collaborations, with influencers and through our own electronic commerce portal ”.To start, they contributed 20.000 euros of their own capital each, which expanded with a round where they incorporated two people "who received 3% of the company in exchange for their knowledge".They have not sought more capital to expand to France, Germany and the United Kingdom, where they are already present.The neighboring country gives them 30% of their online sales;Now the objective is to conquer the United States, where they already have authorization to sell their products, including supplements.

One of the growth peaks came when they started selling through Amazon."We increased brand exposure through that big cake.It represents 24% of sales for us.The rest comes from the retail, in 25%, and online ".His physical channel is in ecological supermarkets, as his tea is cataloged as such;The containers are recyclable and, being powdered, does not need tea bags.“In Spain, 122 are discarded.200 kilos of plastic with these small containers, ”they explain.

Without knowing the client

They have not entered the Horeca channel (restoration) or interest them."We are not in coffee shops because they look for much higher profitability," says Abrines.And explain that "more exclusive gourmet clubs".What at first did not have so clear is who his target audience was."We thought it would be people who are looking for an alternative to coffee, interested in quality products and Japan, but we realized that they were people, especially women, who want to take care of and reduce their stress levels," explains Abrines.

In its beginnings its strategy went through the outsourcing of part of the activity;Now your 12 people team takes care of everything: from shipments and customer management to the payment platform."Cabestany had a strong link with Japan and knew where we could find the tea we were looking for with the right quality, but we had no logistical knowledge to mount this, because we are technical profiles, numbers," explains Abrines, which considers capital "directly manage theOnline sale, customer service, logistics organization and product development ”.Only outsourcing the elaboration of supplements.

During the pandemic they incorporated a person in charge of logistics into the staff.“One of the problems we found then was that we had to be very skilled in importation and management with third parties.To close the work with suppliers and the routes by land, sea and air we need to hire a new profile dedicated only to this, ”adds Cabestany."For us the confinement has been an opportunity for growth and we had to live up to it," adds his partner.