It’s a quintessentially British tradition that we’ve enjoyed for hundreds of years.

The answer to every crisis, a bonding ritual when you welcome someone into your home, and the first drink many people wake up to.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” or even just “Tea?” is music to your ears, right?

Well, maybe not to everyone.

“I guess there’s a sort of association with tea as an old people’s drink,” says Gillie Owen, 20.

The London student says he and his friends prefer water or diet soda.

Meanwhile, Layba doesn’t drink tea at all.

“I’ve never liked tea,” the 20-year-old says. “I think it tastes very strange.”

It’s a stark contrast to her parents, who, she says, “really love” tea.

Is it a generational thing then? As a nation, are we losing our love for tea?

‘Iced tea and healthy drinks’

Last week, one of Britain’s oldest tea companies, Typhoo Tea, went under after falling sales.

The 120-year-old company has been rescued by vape maker Supreme, whose boss says he wants to develop new products under the brand.

Sandy Chadha told the BBC that the tea market was in decline, but said Supreme would seek to appeal to the younger generation who prefer “things like iced tea and healthier drinks”.

Tea sales volumes have fallen 4.3% compared with two years ago, according to analysts at NielsenIQ.

And a recent Mintel survey suggested that less than half the nation – 48% – now drink tea at least once a day.

Kiti Soininen, a food and drink researcher at Mintel, says traditional tea faces “intense competition” from specialty fruit, herbal, green and black tea.

Dylan, a twenty-one-year-old student, says he drinks tea, but not the typical mason jar tea (black with a little milk) and prefers no caffeine.

“I definitely drink less tea than my parents. I drink Redbush tea and other less ‘tea’ teas,” he says.

Shayma, 18, says she also prefers herbal tea, while most of her friends drink coffee. She says there are “so many drinks now” and she hasn’t even heard of Typhoo.

Changing landscape

Ms Soininen points to the huge gap between tea and coffee sales.

“Regular tea sales stood at £377m in 2023, well behind instant coffee at [almost] £1bn,” she says.

Even the popularity of instant coffee is being challenged by the rapidly growing ready-to-drink coffee market, with sales more than doubling in the past five years.

NielsenIQ’s Polina Jones says that while people are “not falling out of love with tea per se”, the landscape is changing with huge offerings of bubble tea, herbal teas, kombuchas and energy drinks appealing to the younger generation.

If this trend continues, she believes brands will need to reinvent themselves and find a way into the ready-to-drink space. Twinings, for example, has started offering sparkling tea in cans, while bottled kombuchas appeal to students and young professionals who buy a meal deal, she says.

Supreme’s purchase of Typhoo includes two herbal tea brands, Heath & Heather and London Fruit & Herb Company, as well as specialty tea brand Ridgways. Analyst Susannah Streeter of Hargreaves Lansdown believes Supreme will fold these brands into the wellness brands it already owns.

Breakfast tea, not afternoon

Another challenge for black tea is that even for those for whom it is a staple, costs are rising and so they are buying in smaller volumes.

In 1974, the average family purchased 68g – about 30 tea bags – of tea per person, per week. By 2023, that had gone down to 19g – about 10 tea bags – per person, according to government figures.

“What’s particularly telling of the potential long-term threat for black tea is that while all age groups have similarly high usage of tea in the early morning and with breakfast, younger groups are much less likely than older ones to reach for the drink later in the day,” says Mintel’s Kiti Soininen.

She concludes with a stark warning for traditional tea makers – if younger generations continue with these habits as they get older, this will ultimately “chip away” at the size of the market.

And as one BBC reader commented on the Typhoo collapse story: “You know things are bad when a tea company in the UK goes bust.”