We’re sure you love our deli teas as much as we do. From sweetened and unsweetened teas to flavored lemonades, the varieties available will go perfectly with your favorite sub or deli snack. Along with our staple offerings, we also have limited edition flavors that are always a welcome addition to our beverage line up. To tell you a little about what goes into creating these delicious drinks, we reached out to our friends in the deli department for more information.

Fun With Flavors

You may have guessed that sweet tea wins the popularity contest, with lemonade, unsweetened tea, and diet sweet tea coming in as the runners-up. Green tea, raspberry lemonade, and raspberry tea aren’t far behind.

To create new flavors, we work with a number of other areas within the company to identify emerging and existing flavor trends.

Once we’ve brainstormed innovative and exciting flavor ideas, product samples of the new flavors are created. Next is the fun part — tasting them! After our teams try the samples and provide feedback, the supplier will make changes to incorporate our opinions. According to deli buyer, Nicole Kolbasiuk-Beetem, feedback may include making changes such as enhancing the flavor of certain ingredients, or adjusting the sweetness of a product. “Sometimes, however, flavors don’t work out as well as we thought,” she says, “in which case we don’t pursue them further.”

Finding What Works

After new flavors have been chosen and tested , we gather a group of customers who get the chance to try them. Input from these groups allows us to get feedback on everything from how customers react to the name and taste, to how much they actually enjoy the product.

Our taste-testing group rates the product being tested on several different factors, and also provide their own comments. Their feedback is used to decide if our products need more work, and to decide if the flavors we’ve developed are ones that customers like you would want to buy.

Final Steps

Once we’ve officially decided on the new flavors and their recipes, we work on bringing the actual product to life, which includes creating product labels. Once final steps are complete, we’re ready to roll out the new flavors to stores.

For our limited-time items, we introduce them individually, taking into account which flavors will work best during each season. For example, chai tea around the winter holidays and refreshing flavored lemonades during the summer. Limited time flavors that are particularly popular have the possibility of becoming available all year long. Our raspberry lemonade and, more recently blackberry lemonade have become permanent items. This is based on the performance of the items in relation to other items in the category. For example, our limited time blackberry lemonade performed almost as well as our best seller, sweet tea, so we decided  to keep the blackberry year-round.

Buyer Nicole Kolbasiuk-Beetem shares, “We want to be sure that we keep the flavors that customers love most, and item sales are the best indicator for which items are the customer favorites.”

Now that we’ve given you an inside look at how our deli teas come to be, we’d like to know which flavor is number one on your shopping list. Let us know in the comments!