Bigelow Tea Improves Quality And Customer Satisfaction

Bigelow Tea has been making specialty teas for over seventy years. The company grows, blends, and packages hundreds of varieties of tea for distribution across the nation. Today, the company boasts the only U.S.-based industrial tea plantation, as well as three packaging sites that employ hundreds of workers. Because of the company’s size, it needed a consistent training program across all its location. This case study examines how interactive classroom training, course customization, and multilingual content helped Bigelow Tea create a companywide, consistent training program.

The Challenge
Building on a legacy of excellence, Bigelow Tea continually strives to improve safety and quality, starting with their front-line workforce.

“We’re in a competitive market and we need to raise the bar each year. So, it is critical that our employees benefit from as much development as possible,” says Bruce Ennis, vice president of human resources.

As Bigelow expanded across multiple sites, consistency with employee training and meeting operations specific goals became a challenge.

“We didn’t necessarily have consistent training programs,” says Ennis. “We had three packaging sites and our tea plantation, and yet we didn’t have a constant approach to safety, quality, or GMP training. So, it created inconsistency in performance.”