Did you know tea has a history stretching back 5,000 years, and iced tea’s sweet history goes back over 100 years? The delicious summertime sip has become such a favorite that it even has its own holiday, National Iced Tea Day, on June 10. And what a fitting time of year to celebrate iced tea! There’s just something about the Southern thirst-quencher that reminds people of summer. As a food retailer in the Southeast, we take pride in how we make ours unique, light and refreshing.
About our iced tea
We started making our deli iced tea in 2003 with sweet, unsweet and diet options, and the following year we began making our Publix Deli Natural Raspberry Flavored Brewed Iced Tea. Originally, we considered steeping our own tea, but we decided on using a concentrate for a more efficient method. We work with a local tea concentrate producer to get the raspberry tea concentrate freshly brewed from real tea leaves.
New flavors are an important part of our research and development, so every year we develop several tea flavor concepts and select a few limited-time tea flavors. We even have our own flavor profile, so no one else has the same particular tea flavors as Publix.
How we make it
We make our deli teas using 2 main steps: processing and filling. First, we add the tea concentrate into a large blending tank along with water, citric acid, other preservatives and sugar, if the recipe calls for it.
After mixing, the tea is pasteurized and pumped into a pasteurized silo. Once in the silo, we test a sample for quality and food safety.
The tea is refrigerated until it’s time to bottle, usually the following day. We then send the tea to a bottle filler, where a machine dispenses it into code-dated bottles. Fun fact: Did you know we make our own gallon and half-gallon bottles on-site?
Next, the bottles are labeled and capped. The tea is then placed into crates, stacked and stored in a refrigerated cooler until it’s put on refrigerated trucks and shipped to stores.
About our dairy plants
Publix has dairy plants in Lakeland and Deerfield Beach, Florida, and Atlanta. We first bottled our deli iced tea in our Lakeland dairy plant in 2003 and expanded production to the other dairy plants shortly thereafter.
The Lakeland dairy plant opened in 1980. It’s 280,000 square feet, employs 275 associates and has 12 production lines. While the other 2 Publix dairy plants produce many of the same items, several categories only come from the Lakeland plant, including yogurt, sour cream and cottage cheese.
Sources: revolutiontea.com, royalcupcoffee.com, whatscookingamerica.net
Watch Publix News Live to see how our deli raspberry iced tea is made.
