Lipton is a British brand of tea, owned by Ekaterra. Lipton was also a supermarket chain in the United Kingdom, later sold to Argyll Foods, after which the company sold only tea. The company is named after its founder, Sir Thomas Lipton, who founded it in 1890. The Lipton ready-to-drink beverages are sold by "Pepsi Lipton International", a company jointly owned by Ekaterra and PepsiCo. They also make soup, but this is not as widespread. History Origins In 1871, Thomas Lipton (1848–1931) of Glasgow, Scotland, used his small savings to open his own shop, and by the 1880s the business had grown to more than 200 shops. In 1929, the Lipton grocery retail business was one of the companies that merged with Home and Colonial Stores, Maypole Dairy Company, Vyes & Boroughs, Templetons, Galbraiths & Pearks to form a food group with more than 3,000 shops. The group traded in the high street under various names, but was registered on the UK stock market as Allied Suppliers. Lipton's became a supermarket chain focused on small towns. Allied was acquired by Argyll Foods in 1982; the supermarket business was rebranded as Presto during the 1980s. Development Shortly after opening his shop Thomas Lipton began travelling the world for new items to stock. One such item was tea, a rare and expensive luxury at the time. Sales had doubled from £40 million in the late 1870s to £80 million by the mid-1880s. In 1890 Lipton purchased tea gardens in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, from where he packaged and sold the first Lipton tea. He arranged packaging and shipping at low cost, and sold his tea in packets by the pound (454g), half-pound (227g), and quarter-pound (113g), with the advertising slogan: "Direct from the tea gardens to the teapot." Lipton teas were an immediate success in the United States. The Lipton tea business was acquired by consumer goods company Unilever in a number of separate transactions, starting with the purchase of the United States and Canadian Lipton business in 1938 and completed in 1972 when Unilever bought the remainder of the global Lipton business from Allied Suppliers. In 1991, Unilever created a first joint venture with PepsiCo, the Pepsi Lipton Partnership, for the marketing of ready to drink (bottled and canned) teas in North America. This was followed in 2003 by a second joint venture, Pepsi-Lipton International (PLI), covering many non-United States markets.