Thomas Lipton

Tea for the masses, Glasgow. Lipton opened a grocery shop in Glasgow in 1871 and built a chain of hundreds, then in 1890 bought tea estates in Ceylon so he could sell tea direct from the garden to the teapot, cutting out wholesalers and selling packets at low prices. Owning the plantations, the packing and the shops let him undercut rivals, and Lipton became a global tea brand. The estates relied on poorly paid Tamil plantation labour.