For a long time, the market for online purchases has been flooded with Pu'er Tea priced at nine yuan and ninety cents, including shipping, and it comes in 357-gram cakes. It's incredibly cheap, to the point where the postage for one kilogram would be around twenty yuan. We were also curious about what kind of raw materials these Pu'er teas are made from and why they're so inexpensive.

Taking the Banna tea region as an example, even the cheapest raw tea (summer tea, plantation tea, tea heavily fertilized with chemical fertilizers) costs around twenty yuan per kilogram; the lowest-quality tea in the Bulang Mountain area still fetches prices in the tens of yuan, which is just the acquisition price for raw material suppliers.

Typically, such raw materials are mostly used for fermenting ripe tea. If used to make raw tea, they would be of the lowest grade. Assuming we use raw materials costing fifty yuan per kilogram to press into 357-gram tea cakes, the cost of the cake itself would be 17.85 yuan. Factoring in pressing, packaging, shipping, etc., the minimum cost for a single cake would be around twenty yuan. Even if sold at a slim profit margin of three yuan per cake, the selling price wouldn't be lower than twenty-three yuan. For tea farmers, there would be no incentive to bypass a sale price of fifty yuan per kilogram and go through the trouble of pressing them into finished products to sell for nine yuan and ninety cents each – not even the most foolish person would do that!

If you've seen Pu'er tea priced at just a few yuan, the first thing you'll notice is the abundance of tea stalks. When making Black Tea, Green Tea, or Oolong Tea, a large amount of trimmings (primarily tea stalks) is produced. In the past, these trimmings were used as organic fertilizer. Motivated by profit, some unscrupulous merchants now purchase them at extremely low prices, such as several hundred yuan per ton, which works out to just a few jiao per kilogram of raw material.

These trimmings can be fermented into ripe tea or pressed into cakes as surface tea, with the cost of a single cake being no more than five yuan. Selling them for nine yuan and ninety cents would still yield a 50% profit. The resulting product is indeed tea, and it doesn't pose any significant health risks. As for taste, those who engage in this practice have their excuses ready: if it's bland, it's due to reasonable fermentation; if there's an acidic taste, it's because of abundant fruit acids; as for the abundance of stalks, well, more stalks in Pu'er tea facilitate transformation… Any defect can be turned into an “advantage.”

The second scenario involves failed fermentation heaps. Discarding the spoiled tea as fertilizer or simply throwing it away would be too wasteful, so it's sold off at a low price. Thus, the spoiled portion is sold at a very low price. These originally undrinkable teas are then processed and sold, at a low cost, for a few yuan per cake.

The third scenario is when some Pu'er tea or its raw materials are inherently poor, or there are flaws in the production process, leading to a decline in quality over time. What can be done? After storing them for so long, they can't just be thrown away! They are reprocessed into low-end tea cakes, which can still generate a small profit.

Additionally, when Pu'er tea stored in damp warehouses gets wet, much of it becomes damaged. Instead of discarding it, it is reprocessed and made into tea cakes that can be sold for a few yuan per cake.

There is also another type of low-priced tea, which is of better quality than the above scenarios. This is a tactic used by merchants to attract traffic, essentially subsidizing sales to gain attention. A specific low-priced tea or a few varieties are used to increase store traffic, with losses recouped through sales of other teas. These low-priced teas serve as advertising expenses. The characteristic feature of this situation is often very clear, and it won't be a constant occurrence but rather limited in time with many restrictions. While e-commerce businesses can afford to take a small loss occasionally, it would be abnormal if it became routine. Consumers should still exercise discernment.

Regarding the low-priced teas available online for just a few yuan, the reasons are mainly the scenarios mentioned above. Are there other causes for low-priced teas that you know of?