Lipton is a brand of tea and was also a supermarket chain in Scotland before it was sold off to Argyll Foods, to allow the company to focus solely on tea. The company is named after its founder "Thomas Lipton".During 1871 Lipton used his small savings to open his own shop, in Glasgow, Scotland and by the 1880s the business grew to more than 200 . In 1929, the Lipton grocery retail business was one of the companies that merged with Home and Colonial Stores to form a food group with over 3,050 stores. The group traded as Home and Colonial Stores until 1961 when it took the name of Allied Stores.Lipton's became a supermarket chain focused on small towns, before Allied's 1982 acquisition by Argyll Foods: the supermarket business was re-branded as Presto during the 1980s.Thomas Lipton began travelling the world for new items to stock in this store, one such items was tea, since sales had grown from £40 million pounds from late 1870s to £80 Million pounds by the mid-1880s. Lipton believe the price was far too high so started growing his own tea and selling them in packets by the pound, half pound, and quarter pound, with the advertising slogan: "Direct from the tea gardens to the teapot." Lipton teas were an immediate success in the US. Thomas Lipton was knighted by Queen Victoria, who made him Sir Thomas Lipton in 1898 at the age of forty-eight.The Lipton tea business was acquired by consumer goods company Unilever in a number of separate transactions, starting with the purchase of the US and Canadian Lipton business in 1938 and completed in 1972 when Unilever bought the remainder of the global Lipton business from Allied Stores.In 1991, Unilever created a first joint venture with Pepsi Co, 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 (LIP), covering many non-US markets. PSI was expanded in September 2007 to include a number of large European markets. Pepsi Co and Unilever each control 50% of the shares of these joint ventures.Due to the 2008 Chinese milk scandal, food giant Unilever started recalling its Lipton milk tea powder in Hong Kong and Macau on 30 September 2008. The tea powder, which used Chinese milk powder as its raw ingredient, was recalled after the company's internal checks found traces of melamine in the powder.