Weddings are increasingly replacing ignored boxes of sweets with personalised tea and coffee as memorable favours. Planners and artisans craft bespoke blends that reflect a couple’s story, from marigold and lemongrass green tea to nostalgic South Indian filter coffee. These long-lasting, usable gifts fit into guests’ daily routines, keeping the wedding alive long after the celebrations end.
There is usually a table at weddings where guests are invited to take away their return gifts, which in most cases is some kind of sweet treat. With folks turning healthier of late, quite often those sweets are disregarded or simply left behind. But the wedding favour now seems to have a new avatar in the way of being edible and long lasting. Enter tea and coffee wedding take home gifts.
Wedding planner Pratik Sheth, tea sommelier Snigdha Manchanda and founder of Tea Trunk, and Rajkumari Jayapalashri Anil, of the royal family of Mysore and founder of House of Berunda, a bespoke coffee company—share more on this trend. Here’s their idea of a parting gift that can be consumed much longer after the event.
In keeping with the new trend, return wedding gift is seen as more of a signature item, such as a bespoke spice mixture, a single estate tea or a small batch coffee with the name of the bride and groom or the story that they share. It’s so popular that it’s making the return wedding gift as important as the decorations and menu. And couples are excited about it.
Sheth explains: “What brides and grooms mostly come up with is a certain feeling, something the wedding should be about, a memory they would like to revive or their expectations concerning the impression the guests should get.” Clearly, the task here is to detect a unique feature of a couple that should be represented in the design of a bespoke wedding favour.
Usually, it takes the form of a cup of tea, adds Manchanda. She recalls, “The first commission for the creation of a custom tea blend was received by Tea Trunk when a couple wanted to have their signature blend of the product. The combination of the marigold flowers, which are an integral part of Indian wedding imagery, and lemongrass turned out to be the citrus-flavoured green tea, which became both the wedding gift and one of our hits.”
She further says, the first thing to consider before creating the blend is completing the questionnaire to understand the features of the future husband and wife which may include a something associated with how the couple met or some element of their life story.
The same story is told in another way when talking about coffee at House of Berunda. When couples talk to Jayapalashri about their request for a personalised wedding gift, they understand the feeling they would like to express through it, but they are not sure how the coffee can help them. “Some of the clients want nostalgic feeling of the traditional South Indian filter coffee, others prefer to have the single origin or more explorative blend, which is now popular among the specialty coffee lovers in India,” she explains.
Recalling an instance where a couple asked for the wedding gift 48 hours before the main celebration, she offered to create a traditional South Indian roast, which was brought even earlier, and this made the couple very happy because they felt understood under pressure.
For Sheth, the key to the wedding favour that will be consumed by the guest is in its ability to fit into the person’s everyday routine, which goes on to serve as a reminder of the wedding after it’s over.
Looks like this is a trend that will only grow. It’s time you tried it as well!