March 18, 2024 0 comment

Spilling the tea with William (Billy) Dietz, Co-Founder and Consultant at BDH Consultants and Author | FoodGrads Podcast Ep. 86

On today’s episode we are talking about building a career journey into the tea industry, the differences about blended and single origin teas, fostering a sense of continuous learning and problem-solving techniques which are pivotal for his consulting pursuits in the tea industry and advice for those looking to go into the tea industry.

Table of Contents

About Billy Dietz

William (Billy) Dietz is author or the book Spill the Tea. Billy has been in love with the tea industry since he first discovered the health benefits of tea back in high school. Billy has over 15 years of career knowledge. Which has amassed from his time as a tea blogger, a tea entrepreneurship, working in product development at DavidsTEA to currently being an independent tea consultant.

Things mentioned in this episode:

This week’s episode is sponsored by:

CareersNow! is Food and Beverage Ontario’s multi-year workforce development initiative that is connecting students and job seekers with employers in Ontario’s food and beverage processing industry for exciting career opportunities. Check out CareersNow.ca for more information on exciting jobs, career information, industry mentors and training opportunities for professional development.

Other things we mentioned in this episode:

Timestamps

[0:00] Introdution
[3:12] Billy’s career journey
[10:49] Why Billy wrote “Spill the Tea”
[12:51] Differences between blended and single origin teas
[19:29] The need of all kinds of tea
[26:39] Where Billy learned about teas
[31:20] Self-learning skills
[41:06] Skills needed for a tea consultant
[49:07] Advice for students

Billy Dietz Quotes

The world doesn’t need more tea geeks. It needs people who understand the work the business of tea. Going in with this understanding of what adjacent skills do I have that I can bring to the tea industry to help further? Overall business that is going to be a very important mindset. I think going in because again you need people in data analytics, you need people in food science, you need people in quality control and safety and compliance and you need. –Billy Dietz

You have almost infinite customization on the user end [with tea]. You can blend a fruit tea with a straight tea. You can decide to brew your straight tea or blended tea however you want. As much water as you want. Whatever temperature or cold, hot you want. – Billy Dietz

How do I say I wasn’t much of A bookworm? I was very much someone who needed to get my hands dirty in order to learn, and so very fortuitously, there was a student who was a year above me and he had opened a tea business. And so I ended up working out a deal, purchased the tea business, ran that company throughout university as well and helped start and operate a coffee company. We ended up merging those together. But anyways, it was very hands-on way to get some understanding of teas. – Billy Dietz

There is no sense like the human olfactory system when it comes to identifying these discrepancies and these differences. And the other thing too, that I want to dive into is that talking to talking to a lot of people that are new to the food industry, they think, well, you need some kind of special gift to be able to do this. You don’t. You need training. – Billy Dietz

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