Ghost products: Twinings Pu-Erh tea

The topic today will be ghost products… But what are ghost products?? Well, according to me, ghost products are those that we see one day, maybe we even buy them but then when we try to get them again we can’t find them, we do a little research on the internet and it’s like they never existed; sometimes we even start to doubt our sanity, did we see the product on a dream??, was it really ourselves who bought it or did someone told us about them??.

I chose this topic today because I happened to stumble upon one of these products. This is my story…
Being somewhat of a tea enthusiast myself, the other day I bought a box of Pu-Erh tea from Twinings; I had read a lot about this kind of tea on the internet but have never tried it before so it was natural to me to get it when I saw it on a stand while walking through the aisles of Wal-Mart in Ensenada (Mexico).

At first I didn’t like it a lot so I just stored it for a few months, but then after reading an article on the origins of the tea and the health benefits it delivered I decided I had to give it another try.

This time it was great (what??? information changes the way you taste things?? of course it does!!) and iced it was even better. In less than two weeks I had ran out of my “new” favorite tea and I had to get more so I went to Wal-Mart to buy more but, noooo!, there was no Pu-Erh tea, nobody knew nothing about that tea and it seemed like they were not going to get more.

I went to a few other stores and although I found Pu-Erh from other brands I decided I didn’t want to go wrong so I had to get the Twinings tea but unfortunately it was nowhere to be found.

This is not uncommon for me here in Mexico, stores start selling a good quality imported product but since not a lot of people buy it and it takes forever for them to sell the supplies they decide not to sell it anymore. When this has happened to me before I always have an easy way to get more, the Internet! Nobody can hide from the Internet! It’s really easy to buy whatever you want or just find information about it.

So coming back to my Twinings Pu-Erh tea, I did the next best thing to get my tea; surf the internet to buy a couple moths long supply. The first stop was Twinings webpage but to my surprise it’s not listed as one of their products, I thought to myself that they might already discontinued it for some weird reason so next step was to Google a good source to get my tea.
This also brought no results, in fact my search was such a failure that I couldn’t even find a reference to the tea, it was like it never existed!
Mmm, I thought, was I really drinking that tea at that moment??, maybe I didn’t look well at the package and it said Tuinings instead of Twinings (yep, brand pirating happens a lot here too), I went to the trash can to rescue my recently used tea bag and there it was: It was real! I wasn’t crazy!!

How come a product is able to disappear in that way???
And even weirder, how was Twinings able to pull this off and why??

It actually was a great tea and I look forward to knowing more about what happened with it, so if you know something about it please comment something about this mystery that keeps me awake at nights!

I’m attaching a photo of a teabag package so you can see it for yourself, plus the internet needs it.