The Taste Awards, which are run by Canstar Blue, are a determination of customer satisfaction with a product’s quality. Canstar Blue is a research company that conducts Customer Satisfaction surveys.
Some 2,500 Australian customer respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with the taste of a specific branded food or drink product. Madura’s teabags received the highest satisfaction for taste, defeating rival brands Twinings, Tetley, Lipton and Dilmah.
Madura is Australia’s first sub-tropical tea plantation, established by a third-generation tea planter from Ceylon in the late 1970s. Ten years later, the company pioneered production of Australian green tea, promoting its natural health benefits.
Today, Madura is owned by four Australian-based families and remains Australia’s foremost wholly owned and operated tea company.
Gary Davey, one of the owners of Madura Tea Estates, received the Award on behalf of Madura on 23 August 2013. “For the second year running, being the winner for best tasting tea, beating all of the major brands such as Twinings, Lipton, Tetley and Dilmah – well, it doesn’t get any better than that!” he said.
Discount tea war in Australian supermarkets
Madura has retained its strong position in what Canstar Blue describes a “very competitive market”. The 100% Australian owned company continues to hold its own against major brands like Lipton, Twinings and Tetley.
Twinings is distributed in Australia through AB Foods, which also owns George Weston Foods, one of Australia’s largest manufacturers of bakerygoods and smallgoods.
In recent times, Twinings teas appear to have been heavily promoted in a price discount war for additional market share against the Unilever-owned Liptons and Bushells brands, while Ceylon Tea Services owned Dilmah and the Indian-owned (Tata) Tetley also have strong followings amongst Australian consumers.
