Monica Sunny from consultant to founding Chai Box
Over the past two decades, the spread of Starbucks stores – now totaling 30,000 globally, with half of them in the U.S. - is creating a growing, sizeable demand for fresh, flavorful coffees and teas in the U.S. and elsewhere. As a result, numerous competing stores, both physical and online, try to lure Starbucks customers to pay more per serving for a “tastier” beverage.
The sellers of “artisanal” coffees and teas range from local shops to chains like Blue Bottle Coffee. The latter was founded in 2002 by James Freeman, a musician in Oakland, California, who had grown “weary of the commercial coffee enterprise and stale, overly roasted beans.”
Blue Bottle operates 91 stores, mostly in the U.S. In 2017, Freeman sold two thirds of his company to Nestle for a reported $425 million. The food giant Nestle, based in Switzerland, has a market value of $370 billion; Starbucks has a market value of $90 billion.
In 2016, Monica Sunny set up The Chai Box, an online store based in Atlanta, Georgia, selling teas flavored with spices. “From the moment you open our blends, you will be greeted by the robust aroma and the beautiful colors of our spices. They have been hand picked directly from plantations in Kerala, India,” according to a blog post by Sunny on the company’s website.
The spices are grown naturally, with no pesticides, and no artificial flavors are added, the blog continues. Sunny’s husband, who migrated to the U.S. from Kerala, is helping her source spices directly from farmers in the Southern Indian state.
All Chai'd Up, Sunny’s version of the traditional masala tea, is a blend of tea with ginger, clove, cinnamon, cardamom, and fennel. In the U.S., it sells for $54 a pound or 16 ounces, good for brewing about 90 cups of tea. While the price is steep for home brewed tea, it is comparable to the price paid by U.S. consumers for a cup of coffee, using pods for their expresso machines sold by Nespresso. Nespresso is owned by Nestle.
In addition to blends - loose-leaf tea mixed with spices used in different parts of India - The Chai Box sells tea concentrates, gift sets, spices and tea-strainers. In India, “Every house makes (tea) differently. Every family has their own way," Sunny told Thrillist. Many of her customers, especially the early ones, are Indian Americans. "We have taken our mother’s recipes, along with generations before them, and created east and west fusion blends and products," Sunny told ExploreGoergia.org.
Sunny’s venture has gotten good media coverage including on the Food Network and epicurious. Last year, TV celebrity Oprah Winfrey chose The Ultimate Chai Lover's Gift Set as one of Oprah's Favorite Things, The set, which sells for $95 on Amazon and $110 on the company’s site, includes four glass jars of teas: Hill Station with roses, cardamom, and loose-leaf black tea; Sweet Monsoon, loose leaf tea blended with coconut, mangoes cinnamon and clove; Lavender Nights, a caffeine-free blend of lavender, rose, cardamom and rooibos leaves; and All Chai'd Up.
Winfrey’s team also arranged for Sunny’s teas to be featured on the ABC network’s television show Good Morning America.
Following the TV show and Oprah’s recommendation, The Chai Box’s monthly sales quadrupled to $377,000 late last year, according to CNBC. The business has seven full time employees, including Sunny and her husband, and 20 part-time employees working out of a 4,000 square foot facility in Marietta, a suburb of Atlanta. Sunny plans to open a retail store in Atlanta in June.
“Growing up in an Indian household, I started drinking Chai at the age of two and blending teas at the age of twelve,” Sunny says in a blog post. “For me, Chai is more than just a drink, it is a part of my culture and heritage...(it’s) a integral part of my family's daily ritual.”
Sunny, 48 years old, worked as a human resources consultant for Accenture, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America. She launched The Chai Box website as a side-business after a mom, enjoying the tea she offered during a play-date for one of her sons, asked why she wasn’t selling the teas she blended. Sunny has three sons whom she taught to make chai at an early age. Sunny came to the U.S. in 1984 from Punjab, India, when she was nine-years-old, along with her parents.
In March 2020, following the COVID-19 lockdown, Sunny was laid off and her husband was furloughed from his job. She focused on The Chai Box, including adding more posts on chai meditation on Instagram.
Her products are available on The Chai Box website as well as on Amazon, Nordstrom and other retailers. In fact, Nordstrom also sells its own spiced chai gift pack. “Start the morning or end the day with a mug of rich spiced chai, flavored with notes of cinnamon, honey and rich black tea. Mix with steamed milk and water for a cup of cozy that you're sure to savor,” according to the product description on the store site. The Nordstrom spice chai sells for $26 for two 16 ounce tins, a quarter of The Chai Box price.
In addition, there are dozens of competing vendors selling teas at far lower prices, from sites like Dona Masala Chai to large established brands like Hain Celestial, all stating their teas are made from organic, natural ingredients and are environmentally friendly. Indeed, tea is largely a commodity business with no barriers to entry for new sellers.
So, Sunny faces the task of converting the customers who bought, following Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, into recurring, long-term clients as well as attracting new buyers. The big advantage in selling tea and coffee, as Starbucks has shown, is that once buyers like the taste and are satisfied with the service they will likely buy more since, being caffeinated, both are addictive beverages.
Sunny likely has an easier path to continuing success than most competing small “artisinal” tea vendors. As Oprah noted in her endorsement of Sunny’s The Ultimate Chai Lover's Gift Set on the Oprah Daily, "There’s a chai for every mood in this lovely set.”
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