Case study - BRUU The Gourmet Tea Club

“We realised that we just couldn't carry on packing the tea entirely by hand, to fulfil orders for customers like M&S, Debenhams and Boots. Our current process was time consuming, wasteful and presented higher contamination risks. Using the machines has meant we can approach bigger customers and save valuable time which has now been reallocated into marketing and sales initiatives.” Anneka - Founder 

Which Phil:              Phil 300 / Phil 500 / Seal 1000

About them: 
Like many great entrepreneurial adventures, BRUU tea club was started to solve the owner’s own problem, a love of loose leaf tea, but nowhere to source high-grade loose tea blends. So BRUU was launched with one mission in mind - to make it easier for tea lovers to try and discover the finest quality tea leaves around, blended with only the most natural ingredients available. The natural step was to offer this to customers on a tea club subscription service, with 3 individually packaged teas to try each month.

The Problem

With BRUU really taking off the small team of 5 were working tirelessly keeping up with customer demand. Each subscription box included three different teas, each individually weighed and hand packed. The amount of time taken to do this was problem enough, irrespective of the loss of product due to wastage, and lack of accuracy due to human error.

BRUU had to weigh loose tea into bags of 7-14 grams using the traditional methods of scale, scoop, bag, funnel and tea. Each bag was placed on the scales and loose fine grade tea or a heavier leaf poured through a tiny spout into the bags. Not only was it messy but if not done quick enough the scales would time out and the weights would have to be checked.

The Solution
With the team at BRUU realising that their company was only going to grow they began looking for an alternative to hand packing. Astonished to find that there was nothing on the market suitable for small companies that weren't going to cost them the earth, nor take up a vast amount of space in small premises.

With the same entrepreneurial drive that launched BRUU, the team set about finding their own solution and along came Phil. Initially designed to help BRUU pack their tea it quickly became apparent that other companies would too benefit from having their own Phil machine.