Sayso, the “first-ever craft cocktail tea bag” brand, is celebrating its first anniversary with a move to new carbon footprint-lowering secondary packaging and new graphics that clearly communicate the product’s purpose: to create craft cocktails and mocktails with real ingredients in mere minutes without the shaking, blending, or mess.
Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Sayso was co-founded by Chloe Bergson and Alison Evans. The two women, who met at Harvard Business School, were looking for a way to duplicate at home the craft cocktails they so enjoyed in New York City restaurants and bars, but were frustrated with the disappointing results they achieved with cocktail kits and liquid mixers that were full of excessive sugar, preservatives, and artificial flavors. Their solution was to develop a line of dry mixes packaged in tea bags that could be steeped in spirits to create one of four craft cocktails (or in a non-alcoholic beverage for a mocktail): a Skinny Spicy Margarita, a Skinny Cardamom Paloma, a Honey Rosemary Moscow Mule, or an Old Fashioned.
Sayso’s cocktail mixes are non-GMO, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, and/or plant-based and include such vibrant ingredients as orange and grapefruit peel, jalapeno, ginger, smoked salt, cardamom seeds, and honey.
Explaining how Sayso came up with the idea to package the ingredients in tea bags, Bergson says that it was important for consumers to be able to see the real ingredients that make up the product. “The tea bag helped us to achieve this by containing the pieces of ingredients so that they were not floating around, and at the same time providing visual transparency,” she says.
It was also important to Sayso to weave sustainability into the fabric of the company early on, including in the selection of its packaging materials. The tea bags, from Nasa Corp., range in weight from 0.16 to 0.57 oz, depending on ingredients, and are constructed of a compostable, non-woven fabric made from PLA (polylactic acid) bioplastic with a 100% PLA thread. The tag for the tea bag is made from a lamination of uncoated paper and PLA.
When first launched, Sayso’s Ready-to-Make Cocktail Sachet products were sold in an eight-count carton, with each tea bag individually packaged in a film/foil three side-seal pouch. This summer, the company switched from the carton to a flexible film stand-up pouch with zipper closure that Bergson says “significantly” reduces Sayso’s carbon footprint by negating the need for individual packaging for each tea bag. This also allowed the company to significantly reduce the cost of the product as well, from $24/unit ($3/serving) for the carton to $16/unit ($2/serving) for the pouch.
Supplied by ePac Flexible Packaging, the new SUP is made from 0.56-mil post-consumer recycled soft-touch matte PET/0.48 mil PCR metallized PET/3.50 mil PCR white polyethylene, for an overall PCR content of 43.5%.
With the new pouch came new packaging graphics as well. While the logo and color palettes remain the same, Sayso has made the finished product the focal point of the package. “On the new package, we hero a real photo of our product,” says Bergson. “Because we are introducing a new product category, we realized how important customer education is. Despite using the tea bag form factor, we are not a tea product—we are a cocktail and mocktail product.”
Sayso products are available online through the company’s website and Amazon.com as well as in select retailers in California and the Northeast, including Citarella, Gourmet Garage, Fairway, Morton Williams, and others. PW
