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Ichitan makes and sells bottled ready-to-drink tea and other beverages, mainly in Thailand.
Ichitan is a Thai beverage company that makes ready-to-drink tea — the kind you grab from a convenience store fridge, twist open, and drink without brewing anything. Its flagship is green tea, sold under the Ichitan brand, and the company also sells other drinks like herbal beverages and functional teas. It is listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand.
The business is built on Thailand's love affair with sweet, chilled tea. Ichitan sells mostly through convenience stores, supermarkets, and small shops, and it spends heavily on marketing — TV ads, celebrity presenters, and promotions — because shelf space in a crowded drinks cooler is won by whoever shoppers recognize first. Its main rivals are other Thai tea and beverage brands, plus global giants like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo that also push bottled tea. The drinks business is simple on the surface: make liquid, bottle it, truck it to stores, sell it. But margins depend on sugar and tea-leaf prices, plastic and packaging costs, and how much the company spends convincing people to pick its bottle instead of a rival's. Volume matters enormously, because the profit per bottle is thin and fixed costs like factories and advertising are high.
Tan Passakornnatee had already built a drinks business once, then sold his stake and walked away. In 2010 he started fresh with a company called Mai Tan, backed by half a billion baht in registered capital, to make ready-to-drink green tea. The bet was simple: Thai people liked tea, and he thought he could sell them a better bottle of it.
A year in, massive floods swept through Thailand and damaged the young company badly, to the tune of over a billion baht. Insurance covered about half, but the company still posted a net loss of roughly 580 million baht that year. It also took a new name around this time: Ichitan Group.
In 2014 the company went public on the Thai stock exchange at 13 baht a share, and in its first year it made more than a billion baht in profit. It also bought the old Bireley's trademark and recipe and set up a joint venture in Indonesia, a first step at selling abroad. Back home, business was booming.
Ichitan ran flashy promotions, with cars like Porsches and Mercedes as prizes and codes under bottle caps. These contests pulled in buyers fast, and in 2014 the company outearned its old rival Oishi by a wide margin. But the excitement faded after about two years. Once shoppers saw through the gimmicks, they went back to buying what they actually wanted, and profits fell hard.
Two things then squeezed the company at once. Green tea makers started a price war, cutting into every bottle sold, and the push into Indonesia and other overseas markets lost money instead of making it. By 2018 profit had shrunk to about 44 million baht, an 86 percent drop from the year before. The stock slid to under 3 baht, down roughly 90 percent from its peak.
The fix was almost boring: stop paying for costly prize contests and drop products that lost money. In the first half of 2019 that shift paid off, and the company grew profit again for the first time in over four years. It was a small win, but it showed the business could stand on real demand rather than gimmicks.
Having steadied itself, Ichitan began reaching beyond green tea. It teamed up with Nestle on ice cream in green tea and honey lemon flavors, and it launched a Korean-style soda line called Tansansu. The message was that the company wanted to be more than a one-drink brand.
Ichitan pushed into a new category again, launching an energy drink called Tan Power. It also closed down a dormant subsidiary, Ichitan Power, which did nothing for the business, so shutting it had no real effect on operations. The moves showed a company tidying up while hunting for its next growth drink.
The biggest surprise came when Ichitan announced a joint venture with the Ekyongwong Group to sell fertilizer, taking a 51 percent stake in a new company called Tan Fertilizer. The venture would take over the Rampatec premium brand, a modest business, and target farmers growing high-value export crops before widening into farm technology. The company that started with a bottle of tea was now betting on the soil.
Ichitan was founded by Tan Passakornnatee, a colorful Thai businessman known for loud, showman-style marketing. The company has faced tougher times as Thailand's beverage market got more crowded and consumers grew more health-conscious about sugar, pushing it to widen its lineup beyond classic sweet green tea. Watching whether it can keep shelf space and pricing power against bigger rivals is the key question for the business.
Saved answer · last researched 20 Oct 2026