Lipton
Logo used since 2014
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| Product type | Tea |
|---|---|
| Owner | Unilever, PepsiCo |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Introduced | 1890 |
| Markets | Worldwide |
| Website | www.liptontea.com |
Lipton is a brand of tea, owned by the company Unilever. Lipton was also a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom before it was sold off to Argyll Foods, to allow the company to focus solely on tea. The company is named after its founder Thomas Lipton. The Lipton ready-to-drink beverages are sold by Pepsi Lipton International, a company jointly owned by Unilever and PepsiCo.
In 1871 Thomas Lipton (1848-1931) of Glasgow, Scotland used his small savings to open his own shop, and by the 1880s the business had grown to more than 200 shops. In 1929 the Lipton grocery retail business was one of the companies that merged with Home and Colonial Stores, Maypole Dairy Company, Vyes & Boroughs,Templetons, Galbraiths & Pearks to form a food group with more than 3,000 stores. The group traded in the high street under various names, but was registered on the UK stock market as Allied Suppliers. Lipton's became a supermarket chain focused on small towns, before Allied's acquisition by Argyll Foods in 1982. The supermarket business was rebranded as Presto during the 1980s.
Thomas Lipton began travelling the world for new items to stock in this store. One such item was tea, since sales had doubled from £40 million from the late 1870s to £80 million by the mid-1880s. However, he believed the price was far too high, so in 1890 he purchased his own tea gardens in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and packaged and sold the first Lipton tea. Staying true to this vision, he arranged packaging and shipping at low costs and sold his tea in packets by the pound (454g), half pound (227g), and quarter pound (113g), with the advertising slogan: "Direct from the tea gardens to the teapot." Lipton teas were an immediate success in the United States.
The Lipton tea business was acquired by consumer goods company Unilever in a number of separate transactions, starting with the purchase of the United States and Canadian Lipton business in 1938 and completed in 1972 when Unilever bought the remainder of the global Lipton business from Allied Suppliers.
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