The Indian Chamber of Commerce (ICC) North Bengal hosted a two-day conclave to promote tea as a beverage among youths across the country.
Titled as the India Tea Conclave 2025, the two-day conclave featured over five business sessions, keynote addresses, interactive tea tastings, and unique experiences such as “make your own tea” and a walkathon on tea.
“ICC has been putting efforts to position north Bengal as a vibrant business hub. It has been hosting different events to enable collaboration, innovation, and new opportunities across sectors. The tea conclave was an effort to bring the tea industry closer to youth, new markets, and future-ready thinking,” said Umang Mittal, the chairman of ICC North Bengal.
He pointed out that the conclave was held with the theme “youth for tea” and brought together industry leaders, innovators, and change-makers from across the country to re-imagine tea as a next-generation consumer and lifestyle product.
Gopal Dalmia, chairman of the ICC’s tea committee (north Bengal), said tea, which is synonymous with the region, is undergoing different transformations, including value-additions.
“The conclave was designed to celebrate the diversity, health benefits, and innovation that tea now stands for. Around 50 varieties of tea were showcased at the event, along with live tasting sessions. Also, experts in the industry spoke on varied subjects to make the beverage popular among the youth as well as to draw the youth into the industry,” said Dalmia.
Prominent ad filmmaker Prahlad Kakkar was present at the conclave and delivered the keynote address. In his speech, he underscored the need for modern branding to reach out to the younger consumers and also for aggressive promotion of Indian tea in the global market.
In India, the annual per capita tea consumption is around 780 grams, which is lower than in several other countries. Time and again, stakeholders of the tea industry have pointed out that there is an option to increase domestic consumption.
“Such conclaves are necessary to explore options as to how the per capita consumption can be increased, and also how we can have more tea drinkers in our country. Many don’t even know the origin of the tea that they have. A lot can be done to encourage tea drinking across India,” said Bijoygopal Chakraborty, president, Confederation of Indian Small Tea Growers Associations.