THE BIG SECRET IN TEA

This starts off gloomy but gets better. Promise.

Tea is too cheap.

We’ve been drinking tea for 300 years. A kilo of tea cost around £1,000 back then, now you can get a kilo for £2. 

Mad.

Hard work goes into growing, picking, processing, packing, branding and selling tea. But the rewards for doing each job are not equal. 

Most of the money is made in the UK. Too little is made where the tea is grown. 

70% of the world's tea is grown by smallholder farmers. 

That's farmers with their own small tea fields. 

And they mostly live in poverty. 

The cheaper tea gets here, the less money there is to go round. 

The focus goes on growing lots of tea cheaply. 

Instead of growing good tea. 

Or growing tea well. 

This means your morning cuppa tastes worse. You start to look elsewhere; coffee?

And the spiral continues.


Traditionally, tea brands buy teas from different countries and blend them all together.

You can't buy tea from a smallholder farmer directly.

It has to be processed by the factory before it can be bought.

And tea can be bought in a mixture of ways...

Some direct from the factory, some via auction, some via brokers or traders. Sometimes, a mixture. 

This makes things murky. And makes it difficult to know what the smallholder farmer who grew the tea has been paid.

That can't be right.


So Lou & Sofia thought "let's start again".

Find a great tasting tea that hits the spot.

Buy the tea direct. 

Talk to farmers, understand what they need.

Pay the farmers more.

Be open about payments to farmers.

For you, a better cuppa. For the farmer, a better price.


SPILL
Good tea. Nothing to hide.