Why MOOD Tea chief Chris Freel says giving to charities should be at the core of every business strategy

The mood for social change is the air and savvy businesses and companies are well aware modern consumers don’t only want a great product, they also want to feel good about buying it.

It’s a sentiment that CEO of MOOD Tea Chris Freel is well aware of, having been at the helm of navigating social enterprise projects for the past five years at UnLtd.

The social purpose organisation works with 22 charities across Australia in the youth at risk space, using connections with media and the tech industry to create relationships with purpose, that benefit both their charity and corporate partners.

When Freel started there in 2017, the core revenue stream came from donated advertising inventory but the need to diversify its income has since seen the organisation expand to include events management (it went from one annual event to now hosting 35 across Australia) and more recently its first not-for-profit product that directly supports youth at risk programs, MOOD Tea.

That journey into tea-making began early on in the pandemic for UnLtd, after COVID-19 sent its events calendar through the shredder allowing other proposals to take centre stage.

Freel says UnLtd had been thinking about building its own social enterprise, inspired by the likes of Thank You and Who Gives a Crap.

“We knew there was a real demand from consumers to be able to not only have a great product that’s cool that you love but that it also does some good at the same time. It was really an area that was growing,” Freel said.

Research into a product began in June 2020 and after initially focussing on the B2B landscape they operated in, UnLtd thought why restrict itself to that market when it could create “something for everybody”.

Why tea?

Besides the practicalities of being a non-perishable good, Freel says research also showed that young people aged 18-35 were actually drinking more tea than coffee “over indexing in areas like wellbeing drinks and kombucha”.

“Lo and behold they also gave a shit about the world, quite a lot more too, and they are really focused on leaving a positive impact and supporting purposed-based products.”

Freel says layering that research with the narrative of “generations and generations of people having a chat over a cup of tea” and that connection was a nice fit with what they stood for.

“I grew up in Northern England where with my nanna, my mum, and my grandad, they’d be making 10 cups of tea a day. For everybody that popped around. That’s where people sat and opened up, that communication and conversation about their day, their troubles or gossip, whatever it may be.”

With new brand of tea in its sights, UnLtd draw on its media, marketing, and creative industries partnerships to get the product and its purpose out there.

“For us, it’s this horrible statistic around suicide being the leading cause of death for young people. We see it a lot with the charities we work with and we wanted to do more specifically in that space.”

Despite all the good reasons to launch a tea range where 100% of its profits went to youth at risk programs, it was still a bold move Freel says of MOOD Tea’s early e-commerce days.

“No-one just buys tea online. It’s not a practice people are used to and it was also really expensive. Our tea is in premium range, T2 is probably the nearest comparison. The ingredients and the care and quality of the product are premium. If you were buying 12 teabags as an individual, it cost you $20 once you pay postage and packaging to get that to your house.”

At that stage most of the support came within its own industry, “people buying tea for their offices”.

“We had some good backing but being in our infancy, we didn’t have the scale to drive down the cost of goods. It was quite a tricky predicament and there were a lot of learnings that first year.”

The Woolies factor

The second year is a different story. With solid backing from mainstream media, Freel says MOOD Tea and its noble cause made its way onto the radar of the big retailers resulting in the opportunity to get into one of the ears of the supermarket duopoly — Woolworths.

“We pitched to them at the end of January this year (at the company’s six monthly/annual range review) and a week later we struck up a deal with them. The buying team obviously saw something in our product and it aligned with their thinking.”

MOOD Tea launched in-store at Woolworths just two months ago and can now be found in 865 of its stores “about 85%” across Australia, but despite barely hitting the shelves, the new relationship has already been a “game changer” for the social enterprise.

“We got first set of numbers from July as the tea was arriving in store. It takes time to get it onto the shelves so difficult to quantify yet, and there’s been no marketing in play but data for the first month is around 11,500 boxes of tea sold through Woolies. At retail price that equates to about $73,000. That’s our first initial benchmark so it will be really interesting to see how we go beyond this. We started media campaign on August 1 which will run until December and that should have an even greater impact.”

Freel says it was exciting and nerve wracking moving into this level of scaling but the organisation is always conscious of whatever it spends, that needed to equate to more returns so it can make a bigger impact.

Where the money goes