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PG Tips

PG Tips is a British black tea brand launched in 1930 by Brooke Bond, which has been the best-selling tea brand in the United Kingdom for most of its history. The name derives from “Pre-Gest-Tea” — the original marketing positioning of the tea as an aid to digestion — combined with “Tips,” a reference to the high-quality tips (top leaves and bud) of the tea plant. PG Tips is best known to British consumers for two things beyond the tea itself: the chimpanzee advertising campaign that ran from 1956 to 2002 and became one of the most recognised in British advertising history, and the introduction of the pyramid tea bag in 1996.

In-Depth Explanation

PG Tips sits at the centre of British tea culture in a way that no other brand quite matches: it has been, for most of living memory, the tea that most British people drink most of the time. Understanding PG Tips means understanding how a brand becomes a household staple — through aggressive early advertising, a distinctive product innovation, and an advertising campaign that transcended tea to become part of British popular culture.

Brooke Bond and the Origins of the Name

Brooke Bond was founded by Arthur Brooke in 1869 in Manchester, establishing itself as a tea merchant and blender. The “Bond” in the company name has a notable origin: there was no Mr Bond — Arthur Brooke added the word to make the company name sound more established and credible to trade buyers, a piece of Victorian commercial pragmatism that has since become one of the more frequently cited oddities in British brand history.

By the early twentieth century Brooke Bond was a significant British tea company supplying both retail and wholesale markets. In 1930, Brooke Bond introduced a new tea under the name Pre-Gest-Tea — positioned as a digestive aid to be consumed before meals — and began distributing it through grocers and tea merchants. The market informally shortened the name to “PG,” and the addition of “Tips” — a reference to the tea tips (the top two leaves and a bud, considered the highest-quality plucking grade) — gave the brand its permanent name: PG Tips.

The Chimpanzee Advertising Campaign

In 1956, when commercial television launched in the United Kingdom, Brooke Bond created an advertising campaign for PG Tips that would run for nearly half a century. The PG Tips Chimps campaign featured chimpanzees dressed in human clothing and placed in domestic scenarios — tea parties, removal van scenes, family situations — with voice-overs provided by a rotating roster of prominent British actors and comedians. The campaign was built on a deceptively simple premise: anthropomorphised animals behaving in recognisably human ways, combined with accessible humour, creates warmth and memorability.

The chimps campaign ran from 1956 to 2002 — 46 years — making it one of the longest-running advertising campaigns in British television history. Characters like Mr Shifter (a removal man chimp) became reference points in British popular culture. The campaign is now regarded with some ambivalence from an animal welfare perspective — the use of chimpanzees in entertainment contexts became increasingly controversial over the decades, and the 2002 decision to end the campaign reflected changing attitudes toward the treatment of animals in advertising.

After the chimps, PG Tips introduced a new mascot: a knitted Monkey character (created in partnership with Comic Relief), launched in 2007, which has appeared in subsequent advertising campaigns with a different but similarly warm register.

The Pyramid Tea Bag

In 1996, PG Tips introduced the pyramid tea bag — a three-dimensional pyramidal format that represented a genuine engineering departure from the flat, rectangular standard tea bag that had dominated the market since the 1950s. The pyramid bag’s three-dimensional structure allowed more space inside the bag for the tea to move and infuse, producing a better cup than the flat bag format permitted at equivalent leaf size. PG Tips marketed the pyramid bag as a quality improvement and the format was widely adopted as a premium signal across the industry; other brands subsequently developed their own versions of the three-dimensional bag.

The pyramid bag was also a commercial differentiator at a time when PG Tips, Tetley, and Twinings were competing intensely for the premium end of the mass-market tea bag segment. An innovative bag format that demonstrably improved cup quality allowed PG Tips to claim a quality argument without moving to a fundamentally different product category.

Production: CTC and the Commodity Market

PG Tips is a CTC (crush-tear-curl) processed black tea — the industrial processing method developed specifically for tea bag production. CTC leaf infuses quickly and produces a strong, dark liquor suited to the British preference for robust tea that takes milk well, and it can be produced at the scale and cost required to supply a brand that moves tens of millions of tea bags per week. The primary source is Assam, supplemented with teas from Kenya and other high-volume black tea origins.

PG Tips is a blend — a recipe that Brooke Bond and subsequently Unilever’s tea buyers have maintained across decades to deliver a consistent cup profile regardless of seasonal variation in individual source teas. The blend recipe is proprietary; the consistency of the product across years is one of the implicit quality promises of the brand.

Corporate History: Unilever and Ekaterra

Brooke Bond was acquired by Unilever in 1984, bringing PG Tips into one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Under Unilever, PG Tips and Lipton (another Unilever tea brand) shared corporate infrastructure while maintaining separate brand identities.

In 2021–2022, Unilever sold the majority of its tea business — including PG Tips, Lipton, Brooke Bond, and other brands — to CVC Capital Partners, which formed a new standalone tea company called Ekaterra. This sale reflected Unilever’s strategic decision to exit beverages and concentrate on other categories; for PG Tips and Lipton, it meant moving from one of the world’s largest consumer goods conglomerates to a dedicated tea company.

History

  • 1869: Arthur Brooke founds Brooke Bond in Manchester; the “Bond” name has no corresponding business partner — it was added for commercial credibility.
  • 1930: Brooke Bond launches Pre-Gest-Tea, marketed as a digestive aid; the market shortens the name to “PG”; “Tips” is added in reference to tea-tip picking quality.
  • 1950s: PG Tips establishes itself as one of the UK’s leading tea brands through grocery distribution and early mass-market advertising.
  • 1956: The chimpanzee advertising campaign launches on the first night of UK commercial television; it becomes one of the most recognised and long-running advertising campaigns in British history.
  • 1984: Brooke Bond is acquired by Unilever; PG Tips becomes part of the Unilever consumer goods portfolio alongside Lipton.
  • 1996: PG Tips introduces the pyramid tea bag — the first three-dimensional tea bag format in the UK mass market — claiming a cup quality improvement over flat bags.
  • 2002: The chimp advertising campaign ends after 46 years; changing attitudes to animal welfare in entertainment advertising are a contributing factor.
  • 2007: The knitted Monkey mascot is introduced as the new advertising character, in partnership with Comic Relief.
  • 2021–2022: Unilever sells its tea brands — including PG Tips, Lipton, and Brooke Bond — to CVC Capital Partners; the new standalone company is named Ekaterra.
  • Present: PG Tips remains one of the UK’s top two or three best-selling tea brands by volume.

Social Media Sentiment

  • r/tea and UK communities: PG Tips is deeply embedded in British tea culture and generates strong nostalgic sentiment, particularly around the chimps advertising campaign. In specialty tea discussions it is acknowledged as a commodity product — not the starting point for quality exploration — but it is rarely treated dismissively; the cultural weight of the brand earns it genuine affection even from drinkers who have moved on to loose-leaf and single-origin teas.
  • Nostalgia and advertising history discussions: The chimp campaign is one of the most frequently referenced examples of long-running British TV advertising; it appears regularly in threads about British pop culture, advertising history, and childhood memories.
  • Animal welfare perspectives: The chimps campaign is also regularly revisited in discussions of animal welfare in entertainment; the retrospective view is generally that it was inappropriate regardless of its effectiveness, and it is a common example cited in debates about changing standards in advertising and animal use.
  • Steepster: PG Tips is reviewed on the platform as expected for a commodity tea bag brand; the standard black tea bags receive consistent if unremarkable ratings. The pyramid bag is sometimes noted positively for cup quality relative to flat bags at the same price point.

Last updated: 2026-06

Related Terms

See Also

Research

  • Pettigrew, Jane. A Social History of Tea. The National Trust, 2001.
    Summary: Historical context for PG Tips and Brooke Bond’s role in the British tea trade; covers the shift to mass-market tea bags and the development of CTC production in response to consumer demand for convenient, strong-infusing tea.
  • Griffiths, John. Tea: The Drink That Changed the World. André Deutsch, 2007.
    Summary: Covers the industrial history of the British tea trade including CTC processing, the dominance of the tea bag format, and the corporate consolidation that brought Brooke Bond into the Unilever portfolio.
  • British television advertising archives. Various sources documenting the PG Tips chimp campaign (1956–2002).
    Summary: Documentation of the chimpanzee advertising campaign — its 46-year run, the Mr Shifter character, the voice-over talent involved, the campaign’s reach in British popular culture, and the animal welfare considerations that contributed to its end in 2002.