Chai's history and culture

Drinking tea, in all different cultures, is a social event. It's meant to be consumed sitting down, and some eastern cultures have created elaborate ceremonies to signify its importance in their culture. 

 In India, the consumption of tea for medicinal and therapeutic purposes was documented as far back as 500 BC. However, it was the British who introduced the Indians to the culture of drinking black tea with milk and sugar. Indians adopted the recipe, boiled the tea with spices and milk to make chai in its current form. 

The British East India Company started the commercial production of tea in India in the 19th century. The foothills of the Himalayas in the northeast region proved to be the ideal climate for tea plantations. As a result, India has become one of the largest tea producers in the world. 

 Those who traveled to India are familiar with carts on sidewalks and street corners selling chai and other goodies. Like the Chinese, Indians drink chai multiple times a day. Like in Britain, the afternoon chai is often accompanied by snacks. As it is with eastern culture, chai is a sign of hospitality. If you prefer to have your chai the “British way” – black tea with a spot of milk - you are likely to be considered an elitist in India.

The origins of our Malt Chai

When I first started The Chai Cart in 2010, I offered two simple flavors: ginger and cardamom. 

Ginger chai was an obvious choice, as I grew up drinking it. It was the first thing I ever learned to make in the kitchen from my mom. Cardamom, another very common spice used for chai, was another obvious flavor option. It eventually evolved into, what is now, our signature Masala Chai, after customers frequently requested a spicier, “masala” chai, which led me to create my own masala blend. 

 Then I started experimenting to find more creative flavors. The Rose Chai was an accidental find; I was being creative in the kitchen and trying out many flavors. 

The Malt Chai, which began as an occasional off-menu item, but now a regular feature, was created out of nostalgia from my childhood days. Before the days when I was allowed to enjoy a real cup of chai, I was permitted to drink a glass of milk mixed with malt powder (remember Horlicks, anyone?). To appease my whining for chai, my mother would pour my milk into the pot with the used tea leaves from the chai she had prepared for my dad and herself. She would then strain this milk into my glass. It was a pretty convincing trick that made me think I was drinking chai, too. : ) 

 The Malt Chai we serve at the carts evolved from those childhood memories.

Spice up your life and your health

If variety is the spice of life, then our Masala chai definitely gives it all its zest. Our signature Masala spice blend has an array of tastes, ranging from the floral, sweet, and aromatic notes from cardamom to the licorice taste of the fennel and the spicy, woody tones from dried ginger and black peppercorns. Not only do these spices provide an abundance of flavor, but they’re also brimming with powerful antioxidants and various healing properties. Here are a few facts I dug up on some of the spices we use in our Masala chai. 

  Cardamom 

Cardamom is considered one of the most valuable spices in the world and is used in almost every culture. According to the traditional wisdom of Ayurveda, cardamom helps in cleansing the body and is very effective in improving digestion. It helps with stomach cramps, flatulence, and gas. 

  Ginger 

Ginger is virtually a medicinal chest. Ginger is commonly used to treat various types of stomach problems, including motion sickness, morning sickness, colic, upset stomach, gas, diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting, as well as the loss of appetite. It is good for healing upper respiratory tract infections, cough, and bronchitis. Other uses include pain relief from arthritis or muscle soreness, menstrual pain, etc. 

  Black Pepper 

From ancient times, black pepper is one of the most widely traded spices in the world. Black Pepper is good for digestion, prevents the formation of intestinal gas, and provides relief for cough and old. Because of its antibacterial properties, pepper helps to fight against infections and is also used to preserve food. 

  Cloves 

Cloves are one of the highly prized spices, widely recognized all over the world for their medicinal and culinary qualities. The spice has one of the highest concentrations of antioxidants. It acts as a mild anesthetic as well as an anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory agent. For this reason, it is used in widely in dentistry and related products. 

  Fennel 

Fennel is widely used around the world in mouth fresheners, toothpaste, desserts, and antacids. The health benefits of fennel include relief from anemia, indigestion, flatulence, constipation, colic, diarrhea, respiratory disorders, menstrual disorders, eye care, etc. 

  No Calories, No Fat 

If those facts were persuasive enough, consider this statement from Guy Johnson, a nutritional scientist from the McCormick Science Institute, “There's no nutritional downside to using herbs and spices. They have no calories. They have no fats. They make food more satisfying. They help modulate food intake. And they have components with substantial biological effects." 

 So why not do your body a favor and give your life some flavor?

We brew our chai with either organic whole milk or organic soy milk (for customers who do not drink/eat dairy). Almost every day, we get a customer requesting chai with non-fat milk or 2% milk. As much as we would like to give customers exactly what they want, we cannot. Mainly b'coz we don't make chai by the cup; all our chai is brewed at a commercial kitchen in the Mission and we transport it to the chai carts downtown in insulated containers that keep it hot for several hours. I've had chai made with whole milk for as long as I can remember. When I was little, growing up in India, we had our unpasteurized milk delivered every morning from the milkman who lived a mile away. It came straight from the cow or buffalo. It was creamy and tasty and no one worried about calories or fat content in chai. We drank chai in 6oz tea cups and not in 16oz Grande size mugs. Of course, India has come a long way since then and milk production and distribution in India has been centralized and is owned by large corporations. There are choices too - whole, skim, 2%, cream on top, etc. What hasn't changed though is my preference for a creamy cup of chai. There is a fine line between creamy and too milky. I prefer to use Clover Farms’ Organic Whole Milk. Clover Farms milk has a nice velvety texture and we choose organic simply b'coz it's more humane. Our chai has a 1/3rd cup of milk. Anything more would make it too milky. Those who are concerned about calories, you shouldn’t be. As we only lightly sweeten our chai (1 tsp per 8oz cup), the amount of sugar and calories in our chai is less than half of what you would get at your favorite coffee shop. Chai is personal and everybody has different preferences in taste and ways to make their favorite cup. I like mine with whole milk and you may like yours with almond milk. And when it comes to skim milk, I couldn't have said it better than Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation:

It's Here! America's first Chai Cart!

So much has happened since my last blog post. The biggest & most exciting news has been getting the permit for the cart. Finally, The Chai Cart® (the company) has a fully permitted chai cart. We operate the cart seven days a week and only take a break when it’s raining. The two chaiwallahs I’ve hired, Will and Dennis, manage the cart in shifts. I am happy to say that the cart is doing pretty well. Every day we see regular customers and new customers. Some even walk a few long blocks to get chai. We offer free samples so that customers can choose between the various flavours of chai we have at the cart- Masala, Rose, Mint, and Ginger. For those who can’t digest milk, we offer a Masala chai made with soy milk. Even though we use whole milk (Clover Farms Organic Whole Milk), a cup of our chai has fewer calories and way less sugar than a non-fat Starbucks Chai Latte or similar drink at any coffee shop. We post nutrition information at the cart for people who care to know. One of the main reasons, I opted for a cart and not a food truck was the openness of the cart. Since the day i started with the bicycle trailer, my favorite part has been the interactions I had with customers. I love listening to stories about travels to India and people's first encounter with chai. I am glad that people find us approachable and we still get to hear many stories from our customers. Some folks stop by to ask us for directions too (no, we don’t make them buy chai). We also act as an information booth for tourists, and it's fun. There have been tea carts and Indian food trucks, but this is the first real chai cart in the US. I, too, am a little surprised that something this simple took this long to happen. I hear so many customers say, “finally a chai cart!”. Yup, it’s here and it’s here to stay.

Streetwise Marketing, Street-side

A couple of weeks back, I got a call from a marketing manager of En Point Technologies- a tech company based in Southern California. They had heard about The Chai Cart and asked if they could sponsor it at an event. From what I understood, it seemed like they wanted me to set up the cart in a courtyard in front of the building at 150 Spear St., where I would hand the attendees a dinCloud branded commuter cup of chai as they walked in to go to their office. 

 Sounds simple, right? Except when I got there at 7:45am on Tuesday morning, I realized the courtyard was in fact in the next building, in front of 160 Spear St. To add clutter to the confusion, there was construction going on in front of 150 Spear St. One of En Point’s employees, Shirley, who lives in the Bay Area, had come out to help with the event. She too had the same information I did (she was roped in last minute to oversee this event) and was equally unaware of the logistics. 

 This was when I was told the back-story. En Point Tech. owns a Cloud Service Provider called dinCloud. Forrester Research was hosting this event on Cloud Sourcing, but En Point was not invited to be part of it. Handing out chai in dinCloud branded commuter cups was En Point’s way to make their presence felt at the event. So, clearly, we were not welcome to not crash the event and could not set up a table in the lobby or anywhere else in the building. 

 I had ~200 cups of chai and I didn’t want to throw it all out. Thinking quickly, I told Shirley that we could set up on the sidewalk in front of the building. We were giving stuff for free, who would object to that? She was game. At first, it seemed awkward, soliciting people to take free drinks, but soon Shirley became a pro at peddling street chai and cookies. We stood there for about an hour, like two street hawkers talking about Cloud Computing. 

 Would you think this was unusual? Well, yes, one person did and he happened to be an analyst at Forrester Research, @Staten7, who tweeted 

#dinCloud crashes #Forr sourcing workshop in SF. Providing free chai and cookies in front of our bldg. Nice guerilla mktg. 

Two days later, I was cc-ed on an email from En Pointe’s Senior Marketing Manager sent to their CEO and the rest of the Marketing staff talking about the tweet. The team was excited that they got noticed. I had a hearty laugh. To be quite honest, I was feeling a bit bad that En Point had wasted money on this event, as the logistics didn’t work out as planned. So, it amused me when I read that it actually worked in their favor! In all the years I spent as a technology Marketing professional, I must say, this was surely the most unconventional marketing tactic I’ve seen. Much kudos to the team at En Pointe for thinking out of the box and being bold to execute something not many companies would!

America's first (formal) Chai Cart coming soon!

Remember the days when I used to sell chai in the Mission out of a bicycle cart? So, it turned out, it wasn’t quite legal to do that. A lot has changed with The Chai Cart business since then. For the last year, the main focus of the business has been the production and distribution of the Chai Brews, which are being sold in stores around the Bay Area. 

 The question I get asked most often is “Where can we find the cart?”. Ever since my bicycle got stolen on Labor Day last year, there has been no chai cart. 

How can “The Chai Cart“ have no cart? This had to be fixed. After all, I have to be true to the name. Plus, I wanted to get back to my roots of selling hot cups of chai on the streets of San Francisco. But this time I want it to be legit. I want to get a Health Dept approved cart and all the permits necessary. 

 If you've been to India, you probably remember the little carts on the side of the road selling chai and other goodies. My vision of a chai cart is very similar to those carts. 

Ideally, I would have liked to brew the chai on-site. After speaking to SF Heath Dept, I realized I would need to add quite a few things (like a 3-compartment sink, ventilation, etc), which would turn the cart into a food truck. But I really wanted was a simple cart and that meant I had to change my plan. I now plan to brew the chai at the commissary, fill the Cambro containers, and use the cart as a point of sale. The people at the SF Health Dept were very cooperative. They agreed to approve this plan if I complied with a few simple regulations. 

 Also, I need permits to park the cart at a particular spot. My application for two spots (one in the Financial District and the other on Valencia St in the Mission) is currently being processed by Dept of Public Works. 

 To finance the cart and the permit fees, I have a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter. You can help by giving $10 or more and receive cool rewards like vouchers for cups of chai or a gift bag with many of our products. There are only 17 days to go and I still have a long way to go to meet the goal. I want people to feel invested in The Chai Cart and this is a great way to make that happen. I hope others will also see the value in this and help me reach my goal of $10,000.