This subject comes up at the beginning of every year: What’s new in tea and what’s changing (as in this World Tea News article covers). Usually, that’s none of my concern; but a passing mention of reviewing trends made me wonder if the Google Trends review of what is searched matches up with what is seen as popular.
I first considered this sort of approach in January of 2014 when I wrote a post about the same theme back when I was new to blogging. It seemed there was a mild uptake of interest in tea back then, but it wasn’t easy to pin that down to a related hot search term.
I’ll mostly use Google Trends results here to check on how searches match up with different topics. In the relatively recent past, matcha and boba/bubble tea were popular. Maybe a bit over a year ago “cheese tea” seemed to come and go, the idea of mixing types of cheese with brewed tea.
To start, the changes in interest in matcha are familiar to people in the tea industry, or even just from noticing it being sold locally:
Definitely a general increase over the last two years, with a good bit of cyclic variation and spikes over that time. The same kind of trend occurs with bubble tea (or “boba”): a bit cyclic, but showing less general increase; maybe not to the extent matcha created an upward trend. I guess bubble tea was popular for a while, so a long and gradual upward trend is what one might expect.
Images provided by author
To be concluded Monday!
