Lyons Tea is the number one tea brand in Ireland. Lyons is one of Ireland’s biggest and best-loved brands. From the jingle every Irish person knows, ‘Extra quality, Extra flavour, Lyons the Quality Tea’, to our more recent innovation of introducing the country’s first pyramid-shaped tea-bag, Lyons is a quintessentially Irish brand. It has enjoyed generations of Irish families growing up with it and seeing it as synonymous with the notion of home and coming home.
In 1902 the Lyons family started their little tea business on High Street in Dublin, near Christchurch Cathedral moving to Marlborough Street, behind the Gresham Hotel, in 1932 and from there they went to a state-of-the-art factory in Goldenbridge, Dublin 8 in 1963 when they produced the very first on-pack promotion. When people bought a pack of Lyons Tea, they could hope to find a voucher for between 10 shillings and £10 inside. Other iconic campaigns, such as the Minstrels and the very popular car giveaway would become a vital part of the Lyons Tea brand over the next 25 years.
In the late 1970s, Lyons reinvented the wheel by going round. The change to round tea bags was so successful that Lyons managed to capture over 65% of the Irish tea market. The famous "Lyons Tea jingle" played an important role in the Lyons success story, and is still one of the first things people remember about the brand today.
Lyons Tea became a part of the Unilever family in 1996 and in 2004 they moved from round to pyramid bags, which was another major leap forward for the brand.
2004 also saw the creation of our famous feathered friends, the Lyons Tea birds: Maggie, Niamh, Pete and Tom and in 2007, Lyons launched a new campaign to celebrate the health benefits of Lyons Tea, as a 100% natural product.
And as of 2010 we moved to our new Talk into Tea campaign. It's no secret that the Irish are big talkers and even bigger tea drinkers. Is this mere coincidence? Actually no. You see, the real secret is that Lyons has been putting the talk into tea all along! So our new campaign “Lyons puts the talk into tea” brought this to life creating a whole visual world from the factory floor to the blending rooms, where conversations where captured in the tea and then all the talk comes out when people drink it.
Lyons Tea is working with the Rainforest Alliance to ensure that every cup of our tea is a step towards a better life for tea farmers, their families and the environment.