Tazo Is Stuck In My Crawdad

Hello readers!  Today is the first Stuck In My Crawdad (SIMC) post!  Since this is a food blog, I’ll try to keep all the SIMC posts food-related in one sense or another.  Today’s SIMC is about Tazo Tea. 

My first disclaimer is that I love love love Tazo, and this post isn’t really about the tea itself. It’s about the new packaging.  I first tried Tazo more than eight years ago.   I was visiting Montana with my mom, and we had a busy day planned so we were up early to enjoy the hotel’s continental breakfast.  We both tried the green-bagged Tazo Refresh tea.  It was an instant hit! The refresh was so… Refreshing! Since then we have tried many flavors of Tazo Tea, and we love each one.  More recently, my favorite has been Awake, the Tazo equivalent to English Breakfast Tea. I still drink the others, but when I have the choice between say, Vanilla Apricot (delicious!) and Awake… Nine times out of ten I’ll drink Awake. 

I hadn’t purchased any Tazo since they redesigned their teabags for their twenty-year celebration.  When I purchased the new box I noticed that the exterior had changed.  It was pretty, and I thought nothing of it.  Once I got home I saw that the box wasn’t the only change. The paper folder holding the teabag had been modified too.  What was once boldly red was now white.   The standout black background for the TAZO name was now black letters on a white background.  The new design kept the red, but only as a wave design along the bottom.  

Here’s my problem with the new design, because I will admit, though it isn’t as bold as the previous one, it is a tasteful, pretty design; if you are a Tazo lover like me, you can’t identify one teabag from another! 

A hat tip to Ebay user silver9amg for collecting this much Tazo!

    The original design wasn’t colored that was just to be boring!  Passion was purple, Awake was red, Refresh was green etc.  Now to identify the teabag I want at-a-glance I have to be psychic, manage to have the names exposed in the cupboard, or have my teabags upside-down!  Storing the teabags upside-down would be a pain because of the pressed top: they wouldn’t be able to support the teabag and would fall over. I have so much tea that it is a problem to try to fit all the teabags at different levels, and would waste valuable tea-storing space!   And though I feel psychic at times, the majority of times I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.  At first blush not being able to tell which tea is which doesn’t seem so inconvenient, but think about keeping the cupboard stocked with tea!  Before the appearance change, there was a rainbow of Tazo teas, after the change has a sea of white bags.  Keeping stock of teabags will require more than just glancing in the cupboard and seeing one red bag as opposed to ten purples.  Now it needs attention, how many Awake have I used?  How many are in a box?  

20 bags in a box.

            The new Tazo design is a slight inconvenience; it really sticks in my crawdad.

~Ashley~