How an off-hand comment can drive innovations in tea and biscuit dunking…

It started with our VP of growth Mohammad sharing his excitement over finding biscuit tea. This is the latest release of the popular British brand “Yorkshire Tea” that has infused the sumptuous flavour of a dunked biscuit with the rich aromatics of a Yorkshire tea bag such that you can enjoy the delights of that sweet vanillary taste without the risk and fear of crumbs at the bottom of your tea.

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This sparked fear and horror in the hearts of many of our team who felt that a biscuit flavoured tea was an offence, and as such alternative ideas on how we might generate that same sweet biscuity flavour and the enjoyment of dunking a tea without facing the jeopardy of crumbs at the bottom of your mug hence began.

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Two Mugs: The first proposal was to just have two tea mugs one for dunking and one for drinking. However, as a company dedicated to sustainability, we felt this may be frivolous and excessive and that the amount of excess water you would boil would ultimately end up killing polar bears.

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Split ‘corner’ mug: Option two was to have one mug with a small, segmented compartment rather like those famous corner yogurt pots that would allow you a dunking area where the crumbs would be confined but still provide the tea drinking experience. This however would incur various challenges not to mention what happens to that tea compartment when you start drinking the tea would it pour down your face? The fact that this would require the mass manufacturing of another consumable item that would have a limited lifespan and use case and therefore would largely be contributing to the overwhelming consumerist challenges that we face today, and also that as you were dunking the tea and a separate compartment you wouldn't get that biscuity flavour in the tea that you were drinking.

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Tea Strainer: Solution number three was to use a tea strainer sat in the top of your team mug to allow you to dunk effectively into your tea but not allow the crumbs to fall. This provides the benefit of the biscuit and fusion within your drink but captures the risk of having crumbs in the bottom of your mug. This idea however fell down on user experience as to drink the tea you would need to continually lift out the tea strainer causing drips all over your table and ultimately driving you a bit mad.

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Biscuit Diffuser: So, an alternative proposition of using something similar to a tea diffuser design on a sprung handle that opens up. You put the biscuit inside, it closes, you dunk it in the tea, you pull it back out and then you eat your biscuit from the tea infuser allowing for the infusion capturing the biscuits but also limiting the amount of inning and outing of a dripping tea strainer. This idea had some legs however still suffered from the drip issue and the issue of needing to manufacture a new item in order to hold the wide variety of biscuits in an effective way.

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Dunking App: The last solution was to develop an app that would perfectly calculate the amount of time you needed to dunk your biscuit based on the biscuit makeup, the temperature and sugar and milk concentration of your tea, so that you could be confident that you could get that perfect biscuity infusion without risking crumb drips. This would require extensive testing in order to generate the data required to assess the relative performance of different biscuits at different temperatures and milk and sugar content of your tea. This would inform our algorithm and so enable users to instantly identify how long they should be dunking their biscuit based on the temperature and milk and sugar content of their tea and therefore avoiding that future risk.

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This of course would be a huge undertaking and would involve the consumption of many, many biscuits, and mugs of tea, however the team were ‘infused’ by the opportunity and as such we have chosen to pivot Qflow’s mission, from transforming construction to avoid waste and enable circular economy, to being one that will unlock the true potential of the noble British tradition of dunking biscuits in tea.

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If you wish to back this new venture or become one of our extensive research team (experience in tea drinking and biscuit dunking is required) please reach out to us directly on [email protected].