Registration first. An LLC filing runs $50 to $200 in most states, with a few outliers. A cottage food permit and food handler card add another $10 to $265 depending on your state and county, sometimes free, often not.

Then the tea itself. A first production run of 100 units, using a mixed-tea wholesale cost of $20 to $40 per kilo, runs between $265 and $410 with pouches and labels factored in. Pouches run close to a dollar each at low volume, and labels around 65 to 85 cents.

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Branding costs whatever you’re willing to spend. A freelancer will do a logo and label design for a couple hundred dollars, or as much as a few thousand. An AI design tool or accessible graphics software is free if you’re willing to put in the time yourself.

Selling requires a platform and a place to stand. A basic e-commerce plan runs $29 to $39 a month. A farmers market or popup day costs $20 to $50, sometimes less.

Add it up and you land somewhere between $374 on the frugal end and $1,264 if you pay for design and incorporate in a pricier state. Call it a thousand dollars. On a 50g pouch retailing at $12 to $14, gross margin sits around 68 to 75 percent once the tea, pouch, and label are paid for.

Expense                                    Low      High
LLC registration                           $50      $200
Cottage food permit + food handler card    $10      $265
First production run (100 units)           $265     $410
Branding and design                        $0       $300
E-commerce platform (first month)          $29      $39
Market or popup entry (per day)            $20      $50
--------------------------------------------------------
Total                                      $374     $1,264

                    Low      High
Tea (50g)           $1.00    $2.00
Pouch               $1.00    $1.25
Label               $0.65    $0.85
--------------------------------
Cost per unit       $2.65    $4.10
Retail price        $12.00   $14.00
Gross margin        ~68%     ~75%

Layer in a platform’s transaction fee and a market’s day rate, and the number comes down, often landing closer to 30 to 50 percent net. That’s still not shabby for a shoestring budget!

A thousand dollars and a weekend is all it takes to get a tea brand off the ground, which keeps the barrier to entry low and encourages competition. The tea itself usually won’t set you apart. Anyone can buy the same wholesale leaf or blends you did. The founders who last and the ones who quit a year later often have similar products. What separates them is whether they dialed in their niche and built a customer base around it before spending the money to find out the hard way.

I met an entrepreneurial couple at the World Tea Expo who joined the Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle to workshop an idea for a loose-leaf tea business. They used the forum, sat in on live sessions, and stress tested the plan with the community. Sadly, they canceled their membership after a few months, saying:

Our original business idea did not prove to be workable, and although we spent time working on an alternative loose-leaf tea business, we never reached a point where we felt we had enough differentiation to really make it successful.

It cost them a couple hundred dollars to avoid losing thousands down the line. Many of our members have growing tea businesses and are continually working with the community to sharpen them, but some are still working through the planning process, bouncing ideas off people who’ve done it before.

Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle is like a room full of people who will ask you the questions you’re avoiding (or don’t know to ask) before you spend big bucks, but also prop you up with financial templates and guides, a private forum, and expert live sessions to learn from people across the tea industry. We even have a Tea Business Startup Course for those brand new to the space, and members get 20% off the course by joining below. You can start a tea business on your own, but in the Founder’s Circle, you’re not flying solo.

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There's a persistent myth in tea circles that blended and flavored tea is nothing more than tossing low-grade leaves, some dried fruits and flowers, and "fake flavoring" into a bowl before slapping on a hefty price tag. This couldn't be further from the truth, and it's a misconception that has driven much of my career.

I've spent the past twenty years in the tea industry and worked with every format of tea there is: loose leaf, powder, teabags, ready-to-drink, liquid and powder extracts, and herbs, botanicals, fruits, and more, not just Camellia sinensis. My interest in tea started as a blogger focused on terroir-driven straight teas, which I still love. But exposure and a deeper understanding of all tea's facets opened my appreciation for every segment that works together to form the industry we know and love.

Blended tea is like cooking a meal: low-quality ingredients yield subpar results, no matter how skilled the chef. Just as a ripe, beefsteak tomato transforms into something sublime with flaky salt and extra virgin olive oil from Tuscany, blending has the power to turn quality ingredients into something extraordinary. It's an art that brings together different flavors, aromas, and textures to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

Many tea purists don't realize that blended and flavored tea drives much of the revenue for the entire industry. Even purveyors of the highest quality single-origin teas often rely on blends to keep their businesses viable. These accessible teas have paved the way, increasing the availability of tea and raising overall quality standards across the industry.

Admittedly, I couldn't find publicly available statistics to back up this claim. However, it's rooted in the hundreds of conversations I've had with tea brand owners, co-packers, and blenders of varying sizes and market positions all over the world. They've all told me their business wouldn't grow without selling blended and flavored teas.

When I entered the blended tea world ten years ago, I struggled to find reliable information on the subject. The knowledge existed, scattered across dubious online sources, locked away in verbal traditions passed from master to apprentice, or cradled in the minds of industry veterans. I saw an opportunity to create something comprehensive.

I reached out to my network of tea lovers, industry professionals, entrepreneurs, and curious hobbyists to collect their questions. Discovering that all these diverse groups had remarkably similar questions about blended and flavored tea inspired me. This common curiosity became the foundation for my book, Spill The Tea: Unveiling The Mysteries Of Blended, Flavored, And Herbal Teas.

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Working with subject matter experts who generously shared their expertise, I built the book around those common threads: flavoring techniques, ingredient sourcing, supply chain complexities, certifications, and the economics behind it. The result isn't a how-to blending manual, but rather an insider's guide that demystifies the nuances, vocabulary, and systems that govern this complex industry.

Spill The Tea is the book I wish I had when I entered the industry. Blended and flavored tea education deserves better representation, and I hope this will spark further research and storytelling. It's for the curious hobbyist wondering what's really in their morning Earl Grey, the entrepreneur with a bright tea idea, or the industry professional seeking deeper knowledge about this crucial market segment.

The Steep Insights: Founder's Circle is our members-only community where we help tea business owners scale, avoid expensive mistakes, and shorten their time to commercialization. We provide proven templates like business plans and financials, organize monthly live sessions, and foster a supportive community of entrepreneurs who want to see each other succeed.

The book represents more than just information. It's a defense of the craft, skill, and artistry that goes into creating the blends that introduce millions of people to tea every day. I’m not suggesting everyone needs to drink blended and flavored tea, but understanding the category can yield good insights for tea purveyors and professionals across the board. These aren't inferior products; they're cornerstone cuppas that deserve recognition and understanding.

As one reviewer put it: "[The book] will give you the superpower to decipher the look and label of the teas you encounter."

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Bergamot, the main flavor component in Earl Grey tea, is an aromatic citrus fruit from Italy. It’s perfumy, floral, and zesty, making it versatile for blending. I’ve sampled a literal metric ton of Earl Grey variants, from pineapple Earl Grey to Earl Grey chai to chocolate. The flavor works on many tea bases too, the classic being Ceylon or Chinese black, but oolong and rooibos make distinct canvases.

Why do we love Earl Grey tea so much? Not specifically you, perhaps, but the greater population?

One of my clients last year asked me to develop a line of five tea blends to sell online. I went through the motions of asking about their target market, positioning, and distribution strategy, then blended the products to match. Before we’d even finalized packaging, they asked my prediction for the top seller. No hesitation, I said their cardamom Earl Grey would be number one. I hadn’t even tasted the final blend yet, but I’ve seen this pattern repeat across enough clients. It’s sitting at a perfect five-star rating right now, and I’d bet it’s outselling the other four blends combined.

Bergamot is a citrus fruit, and citrus is a familiar global flavor. Blood orange and yuzu sit next to lemon and grapefruit as mainstream nowadays, so there’s no need to hedge or gradually introduce the flavor. Citrus reads bright and a little fruity, and black tea is commonplace. Not much more explanation needed. This lowers the barrier to entry. Other tea types and flavors require some level of explanation or anchor flavors to entice trial, like Capri Sun introducing people to kiwi in the 90s by pairing it with strawberry. Earl Grey already commands recognition.

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That familiarity, and the fact of it being a citrus fruit, also makes bergamot an incredibly versatile flavor base. Ginger Earl Grey, chocolate Earl Grey, lavender Earl Grey, vanilla Earl Grey, they all work because citrus either connects or enhances the pairing. I’ve blended enough Earl Grey variants at this point to have a full graveyard of failures. I’m still frustrated that I can’t get blackberry Earl Grey to cooperate in the cup, even after years of trial. It sounds delicious on paper. But the hit rate for bergamot is still remarkably high compared to other flavors.

One thing that’s stuck with me through years of tea sourcing and blending is how differently regions formulate bergamot. North American variants tend to be more citrusy and fruit forward, leaning into orange and lemon notes. European versions always lean sharper, more perfumy and floral, closer to the true flavor of the raw fruit. I was fortunate enough to sample a fresh bergamot from Sicily on a blending trip to Germany one year. A contact overnighted the fruit to Hamburg ahead of my visit to the tea blender. It’s a great sensory memory for the flavor bank, but I wouldn’t ever slice up a bergamot raw and eat it. Way too pungent, and my mouth was tingling for the next ten minutes.

How odd that the fruit itself is almost hostile in its raw form, yet somehow became a staple of the global tea industry and one of the easiest flavors to sell. No one is tasting bergamot off the tree. They’re only familiar with what generations of tea blenders decided to do with it, and maybe that’s the real story.

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Classic tea preparation doesn’t lend itself well to speed, a barrier considering many restaurants prioritize quick, efficient operations. Tea has a reputation for being finicky, demanding perfect water temperatures and steep times, otherwise resulting in an acrid cup. Many restaurants reasonably conclude that tea isn’t worth the trouble unless it comes from a fountain or spigot, prioritizing efficient products like alcohol, lemonade, coffee, and soda.

Innovations like concentrates, extracts, and more automated preparation equipment remove the guesswork for staff and ensure tea is an easily replicated, consistent process. The quality available in these formats is rising too, meaning the excuses to serve bad tea are diminishing. Co-packers can produce private label blends for restaurants with a single location, and the margins on offer are hard to beat. A single serving of tea, depending on format, costs somewhere between five and twenty-five cents. Restaurants routinely charge four to eight dollars for a serving. Run those numbers and you’re looking at gross margins that flirt with triple digits with minimal investment in equipment and labor.

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The definition of tea has expanded too. Matcha is the new darling on fast-casual menus that would never have considered it three years ago. Hibiscus is a fixture in cocktails and mocktails, both for its tartness and dazzling ruby color. Bubble tea introduced an entire generation to tea as a customizable experience rather than just a beverage made of dried leaves and water. Herbal tea and botanicals are an easy sell to customers seeking caffeine-free, functional products. Every one of these formats gives restaurants permission to explore tea as a highlight rather than an afterthought.

Restaurants don’t need a $30 high-end gong fu tea service. Sometimes a quality concentrate does the job well enough to be used in a bar program and for individual glasses of iced tea. The corner diner serving gallons of coffee from the automatic brewer each day probably doesn’t need a luxury tea service, but a flavored cold-brew tea might suit their afternoon crowd and boost their bottom line.

Decent tea options for restaurants are available without the hassle. Or the right type of restaurant might want to opt for a more theatrical approach to their beverage service. Tea is adaptable, high-margin, and satisfies many different palates. It’s worth serving better tea.

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This was one of the foremost tea traders in the world, usually buying container loads of tea and other ingredients, so seven kilos barely registers as inventory. This exclusive and rare lot was purely a prestige purchase, far from the trader’s usual cadence. Tea like the Namring Darjeeling I tasted that morning is hard to come by and barely drives meaningful revenue. Blended tea is the financial backbone of the global tea industry.

The term “single origin” isn’t defined or regulated. One country? One district? One garden? One flush from one plot in one season? Depending on which country the tea is produced in, the answer would probably differ anyway, because each country’s supply chain runs differently.

Geography is the closest thing we have to a meaningful definition. Darjeeling is a good example, as it’s one of the only regions with a registered geographical indication. Since 2004, India’s GI has covered products from specific estates in the Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts. India’s Tea Board also holds certification marks for Assam, Assam Orthodox, Nilgiri, and Nilgiri Orthodox. These are defensible claims tied to specific places.

But even within these protections, there’s confusion. Darjeeling’s labeling guidelines specify that tea blended from multiple gardens, as long as every garden falls within the Darjeeling definition, has to carry the label “blended Darjeeling tea,” not simply “Darjeeling tea.” Tea sourced from outside the region, combined into a multi-origin blend, is required to disclose that too. There’s even a Certificate of Origin process with inspection procedures meant to protect the integrity of the supply chain. In practice, this is difficult to enforce, and Darjeeling remains a region with high instances of counterfeiting. Twenty years in tea, and I have yet to see a label specifying “blended Darjeeling tea” when I know for a fact it is.

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Japan just handed us a stranger version of the same problem. In July 2026, the country’s agriculture ministry registered “Japanese tea” under its geographical indication system, a designation that applies to green tea grown, harvested, and processed anywhere in the country. It’s only the second time a GI of this kind has ignored region entirely, the first being Japanese sake, which sits under a different agency’s jurisdiction altogether. Most Japanese green tea gets blended before export, and a GI broad enough to cover the whole country still lets nearly all of it qualify, blended or not. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

If a government investing in GI protection can’t write a tea definition tighter than “made somewhere in Japan,” what exactly are we protecting?

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We gabbed for a couple of hours, both of us happy to disappear into tea’s nerdy sidequests, but the conversation skewed toward the practical side of tea economics, high-level tea trends in Europe versus North America, and go-to-market strategy. We’ve stayed in touch ever since that meeting last summer.

Lorela runs WanderlusTea, a Brussels-based consultancy that helps tea brands, domestic and foreign, find their footing in Europe. What struck me wasn’t her enthusiasm for tea, though that’s evident, but how unsentimental she was about what actually drives tea’s adoption. Customers don’t always need a lecture on terroir. Quite simply, they need an outcome, a reason tea fits somewhere in their already full day. Experience, function, flavor, and format can all be levers, but each requires the right communication behind it. That gap, between what a brand wants to say and what a buyer needs to hear, turned out to be the exact territory she covered a year later in a Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle live session on brand ambassadorship.

Her tea epiphany happened in a Prague teahouse in 2019. The Chinese owner served her exquisite teas, changing her perception of tea entirely. It snowballed from there, and her passion eventually led her to start a consulting practice helping brands grow in Europe. That origin sounds romantic, but she hones in on the practical side of sales and growth: logistics, pricing strategy, buyer relationships, events, tradeshows, and more. In her experience, sales rarely happen after a single contact with a customer. Relationships get built over months, through many different mediums. Tea is a long game.

Lorela represents tea brands. Is she an influencer? Not quite. She describes herself as a tea ambassador. Influencers give brands access to an audience, reach, awareness, content, all useful but not necessarily integrated into a sales process. A strategic ambassador is closer to a regional sales representative. She brings pointed market knowledge, fosters buyer relationships, hosts events, and scouts for opportunities. The specific agreements and needs of each client differ, though, so she stays adaptable to each one.

One company she’s currently working with is a regenerative organic tea brand seeking market entry into Europe with a relatively new product type. Low awareness, a high price point, and a product most consumers, even in tea, are unfamiliar with. Her proposed go-to-market strategy runs in three interconnected phases: driving awareness through events, building consideration through tastings and experiences, and tracking conversion through reorders. Sampling is an effective strategy for tea brands, but it’s rarely an immediate trigger. It usually takes several touchpoints before conversion.

Lorela hit on an important messaging disconnect that hinders so many tea brands. The brand speaks one language, but the buyer is asking in another. So often, tea brands lead with what they think matters and not what buyers actually want to know. Consider a wholesale tea brand seeking a deal to become the exclusive tea provider for a coffee shop. The seller might lead with origin, quality, and tasting notes, when the buyer’s real questions are about margin, preparation and operational flow, and consistency. Someone has to translate between the two, and that’s precisely the role a good tea ambassador plays.

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Europe presents a distinct challenge of its own. Generalizing, adopting one strategy for the whole continent, won’t cut it. Each country has its own language, its own tea culture and habits, its own price sensitivities, and its own distribution systems. A brand that performs well in France might not bloom in Germany. Lorela approaches this with a ninety-day pilot structure: mapping the market and building a prospect list first, running outreach and tastings second, and tracking conversions and successful levers last to refine the strategy going forward.

Lorela is playing a long game, and she knows it. Building a new tea market rarely happens through one clever campaign. The growth is in the slow accumulation of small, compounding wins built over months and years.

If you’re weighing whether your own tea brand needs an ambassador or just a sharper go-to-market plan, Lorela’s site is worth a visit, as is her newsletter. She’s tucked something in there specifically for prospective Founder’s Circle members too, so if you’re thinking about joining our tea entrepreneur community, this is the right moment.

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But like the majority of adults in North America, I start my day with a cup of coffee, usually pour-over, honey processed, Costa Rican from Monteverde.

I picked up the habit from my partner, a coffee fanatic, but enjoyed drinking coffee before we met. I’m even a certified barista under the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe, and helped build a micro-roaster and coffee shop while attending university.

As much as I want to see the tea industry in North America flourish, I’m not delusional about coffee’s iron grip on the morning routine, unlikely to loosen in the coming years. Optimists will point to matcha as evidence of tea’s rise to usurp the bean, and while matcha has opened people’s palates to the leaf’s merits, it’s still a drop in the bucket.

It’s hard to nail down an exact number, but scanning several sources peg the entire coffee market in the US and Canada upwards of $100 billion across at-home, retail, coffee shops, foodservice, and ready-to-drink, and still growing. Tea’s powdered green darling sits at around $2.5 billion. The press treats matcha as coffee’s next rival, and while matcha’s growth is real, its scale, relative to coffee, is meager.

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Matcha is battling to own an occasion coffee dominates, promising an anti-jittery start to the day. Early adopters and social media savvy users hungry for new content embraced matcha and helped spread the message, but the masses couldn’t care less, acknowledging the matcha headlines while slurping the last dregs from their automatic coffee pot. While I think matcha has a place in the morning routine, I don’t think it will ever reach the dollars in coffee.

Starbucks released its first chai latte in Los Angeles in 1998, moving it to the permanent menu in 1999. Early articles spotlighting chai claimed it would be the next big beverage boom to compete with coffee, but I don’t see any evidence to suggest it came close. The highest number I could find, from a dubious source, pegs the global chai market at around $15 billion, nowhere close to replacing the morning coffee ritual.

Black tea leads the tea market in North America, owing to the iced tea market, arguably the only rooted cultural consumption habit here. Sweet tea, fountain tea, and ready-to-drink iced teas define tea for most people, always black, and usually served with lemon and sugar, or those pink and yellow sugar-free sweetener packs. Yet even this staple is showing signs of contracting. Recently reported dollar gains in the total market owe entirely to price increases, not higher volume. It’s a flat market feeling inflation’s impact.

Is the tea market actually growing in North America? Yes, and it points to an occasion where tea can dominate.

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“Do you know who makes this blend?” she asked, practically shoving the small pouch under my nose. “I need to keep it on my shelf!”

I’ve been working with major specialty tea blenders and co-packers all over the world for over a decade, and each has their own signature style, like a tell in a poker game. I knew which blender made that tea from a single whiff. Their wholesaler wasn’t lying. The original blender was indeed shrinking its footprint in North America. She seemed defeated, so I suggested she speak with another one of her suppliers and try to match the blend. She left more hopeful, ready to make the call.

That interaction, a dramatized but true event, reveals how consolidated the blended and flavored tea industry is. Hundreds of thousands of tea brands thrive in Europe and North America alone, backed by a handful of blenders and co-packers behind the scenes. One might surmise there’s a flaw in this structure, but I think it’s led to more diversification, innovation, and growth in the tea industry.

The capital and skills required to build and operate a compliant and effective blending facility from scratch are beyond what most tea founders could ever raise from day one. Manufacturing operations and brand building are two different beasts, and trying to manage both from the start is like climbing Mount Everest with nothing but a fork and flip-flops. Instead, most brands use a co-packer’s existing infrastructure and focus their efforts on sales and distribution. Co-packers make it possible to start a tea business for less than a thousand dollars.

If dozens of brands buy from the same suppliers and, in some cases, identical blend recipes, what’s left to distinguish one from another?

Product alone is rarely an effective differentiator in tea. Specific positioning and narrowing down a niche are a far better strategy to stand out. Successful brands find a target outcome and hone in relentlessly. An exclusive tea blend formula won’t drive sales alone. Meeting customers’ needs better than any other brand will keep people coming back.

One of the top-selling tea flavors in Europe and North America is Earl Grey. This flavor consistently pays the bills for almost every tea brand I know. Traditional Medicinals, a pseudopharmaceutical tea brand with an annual revenue of around $170 million, doesn’t carry Earl Grey and probably never will. People buy Traditional Medicinals for a specific ailment, not an afternoon pick me up. The Earl Grey customer isn’t for them, and chasing them would be a waste of resources.

Tea entrepreneurs often ask me about custom blends, making proprietary formulas, and sourcing tea directly from origin to stand out. My response is usually some version of start small with a trusted vendor’s catalog teas and blends, and refine the niche and positioning before exploring other options. Tea isn’t an overnight business, and it takes time to carve out market share.

Somewhere out there, a version of your favorite tea blend is sitting in another brand’s tin, under another name. You’d probably never even notice.

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He was ten minutes into an hour-long Founder’s Circle session on what he’d do differently if he were starting Nepal Tea Collective today. Nish has grown the company from humble beginnings, two hundred dollars and a stack of credit cards, into one of the more interesting tea companies to emerge in the last decade. He relayed ten concrete lessons to our Founder’s Circle members.

1. Find your people

Nish was a solopreneur for five years. Packing orders, writing social posts, cold-emailing tea buyers across the country, unpaid, kept afloat by his wife’s income. “Everybody tends to glamorize entrepreneurship,” he said. “But a lot of people don’t talk about the loneliness, because you’re sitting in a room basically doing everything by yourself.” He eventually found community in a cohort of impact-driven entrepreneurs, and credits much of the company’s growth to his two co-founders. Each has a lane, complementing one another. One dreams up the ideas. Another builds the systems. The third scales it. The fit happened naturally, and Nish was clear that forcing it would have been a mistake.

2. Know your why

“There are hundreds, if not thousands of tea companies in the US alone,” Nish said. “Why do I need to exist?” Most Nepali tea gets exported to India and resold under an Indian label, burying its origin, and the growers behind it are nearly invisible to consumers. “Tea is one of the most popular beverages in the world after water,” he said. “Almost four billion people drink it every day. And the farmers who make it are living under two dollars a day, in extreme poverty. How can a beverage be so popular, and the people who make it be living in poverty?” Nepal Tea Collective’s clear why is bringing recognition to Nepali tea and fair compensation to the growers.

3. Do the research

Not market research in the abstract, but real positioning. Are you filling a true gap? Who exactly is your customer? What kind of company are you actually trying to build? A lifestyle business and a global titan require entirely different decisions from day one.

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4. Give yourself five years

One of Nish’s earliest customers, who became a mentor, learned he wasn’t yet paying himself. Without fanfare, she remarked, “That’s fine, do it for five years. In five years, if you can’t pay yourself, this is a hobby, not a business.” He landed one of his biggest customers almost exactly five years in. It’s a brutal but useful framework. Give a business real time to prove itself, but not infinite time.

5. Businesses depend on budgets

Nish started with two hundred dollars and ran the business on credit cards for the first year, though he’s quick to say that isn’t a path for everyone. A crowdfunding campaign raised close to fifty thousand dollars and broke the debt cycle. The mechanism isn’t important, as there are plenty of ways to fund a business. The lesson here is that he’d set a real number for what he was willing to risk, and he didn’t exceed it blindly.

6. Don’t do everything yourself

His first product shipped in a generic box covered in stickers he applied by hand to save money. Each box took about fifteen minutes to assemble. “Please don’t do that,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense at all.” Packaging, he added, is often more expensive than the tea itself, and it’s one of the first things worth handing off so your own time goes toward sales, the lifeblood of any business.

7. Join Founder’s Circle (no, I didn’t pay him to say this)

“My first point is join Founder’s Circle,” Nish told the group right out of the gate. “If I were starting my company now, this is exactly what I would do, because there wasn’t a place like this.” He could only go so deep in an hour, but every answer he gave was unfiltered, drawn from what really happened rather than a polished version of it. If you’ve been building quietly and hitting the same walls, join Founder’s Circle for the live sessions, the peer group, and the tools to build your business better.

Paying subscribers can read Nish’s final three lessons, including a hard-won reversal on something he swore he’d never do.

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I must concede that I’m not a regular matcha drinker, and I feel like an outsider. Matcha, love it or hate it, is still growing, popping up in cafes and grocery aisles that wouldn’t have touched it a decade ago. The health halo and vibrant color help attract consumers, but its caffeine is the real reason people order it, humanity’s preferred drug. And matcha punches above its weight on that front.

Steeped tea and brewed coffee are hot water extractions. You sip the liquid, not the organic material. Matcha is a suspension, the whole leaf, ground and consumed. That distinction matters, because fresh tea leaves contain a higher percentage of caffeine by weight than coffee beans, somewhere around 3.5% versus 1-2%. Coffee still wins on average caffeine per cup, but only because of dose and surface area. It takes more coffee per cup than tea, and a finer grind extracts faster and more completely than steeped leaves ever do. Unless it’s matcha.

Matcha is the most concentrated caffeine delivery system in the tea world, full stop. If you’ve assumed reaching for matcha was the gentler choice, you’ve been misled. Yet it rarely feels like a cup sends you to the moon. Most matcha drinkers describe a steady, tempered lift, not the jolt commonly associated with coffee. That’s L-theanine at work, an amino acid common in tea leaves but absent in the bean.

Matcha contains both compounds in around a 3:2 ratio, favoring caffeine. L-theanine doesn’t mitigate or cancel caffeine. The two work in concert, playing off each other like brass and wind sections building toward the same crescendo. Research suggests L-theanine sharpens the cognitive boost caffeine provides while taking the edge off the anxiety and tension caffeine alone tends to produce, the infamous jitters.

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Tea type alone isn’t indicative of caffeine level. But if you’re tracking your intake, matcha deserves a harder look than its reputation suggests. Paid subscribers can read where else this logic falls apart, decaffeination’s dirty secret, and why the “30-second caffeine wash” is completely bunk.

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The moment a potential customer walked by their shop, a Tea Guide, DAVIDsTEA’s name for their store employees, offered them a sample, always caffeinated and caffeine-free options. Once inside, the Tea Guide opened a natural conversation, asking about flavor preferences, caffeine tolerance, whether they were shopping for themselves or for a gift, and how they usually steeped their tea. Dashing to the tea wall, they’d pull five or six curated options and explain how each one fit the customer’s answers. Closing came naturally, and upsells didn’t feel forced. Adding a thermos or fill-your-own sachets was a logical next step, not an additional pitch. They built a sales model that identified customers’ needs and objections early, then made it as easy as possible to secure a “yes.”

None of the countless teashops I’d visited before led with that kind of clarity. Most conversations started with origins, tea types, elevation, and ethereal tasting notes before anyone asked about my preferences. For a first-time customer, that’s a signal that they don’t belong. Is there a better way to secure sales?

One of our Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle members recently asked how they could increase their sales at farmers markets and consignment shops. There’s no silver bullet, and I want to be clear about that upfront. A market stand in Burlington, Vermont won’t employ the same strategy as a tea retail storefront in downtown Vancouver. A loose-leaf specialist selling to dedicated enthusiasts faces a different problem than a brand trying to convert coffee drinkers. Before asking “how do I sell more,” the more useful starting question is “who, exactly, am I trying to sell to?”

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Once a brand or founder gets clear on that, they should obsess over removing friction. Consumer behavior research offers some patterns consistent enough to be useful, even if none of them are guaranteed. Free samples, for instance, help because they reduce the perceived risk of buying something unfamiliar. Research suggests that small tastes tend to increase desire rather than satisfy it, something like an amuse-bouche before a meal. Separate work on social reciprocity shows that receiving something without being asked to pay creates a quiet obligation that nudges people toward a purchase. A cup of iced tea offered before any product knowledge gets shared is one of the lowest-friction moves a tea brand can make, and it costs almost nothing to execute consistently. Something I always tell new tea founders is that product is their best marketing spend.

This question inside Founder's Circle sparked a thread full of actionable ideas from other tea entrepreneurs, and Nish Banskota from Nepal Tea Collective is joining us June 25th at 3pm EDT for a live session that'll go even deeper. If you're serious about building a tea business, join the community today.

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Camellia Sinensis attracts and retains tea aficionados just as much as new entrants. Over half their business is wholesale and private-label packing, quality tea selling with no prominent story or deep cut qualifiers. Their multi-pronged model works precisely because it doesn’t require the customer to have any prior knowledge. The first-timer and the pu’erh collector are treated equally in the shop, their tea table the prime example of democratization.

I’ve written about matcha’s meteoric rise, which ironically was propelled by the coffee industry. Cafe owners and large chains pushed a clear narrative: drink matcha for a sustained, controlled caffeine buzz if coffee gives you the jitters. That message, combined with matcha’s visual appeal and its 1:1 fit into existing espresso bar workflows, drove mainstream adoption. The coffee industry didn’t educate the masses about matcha, they led with a simple outcome.

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Many tea shops still champion education, leading new customers through origin stories and cultivar specifics and what differentiates greens from oolongs before they’ve decided they even like what’s in the cup. This information is important, but it’s the wrong opening move for a new tea drinker. Leading with complexity is intimidating. Leading with simplicity is invitational. Tea brands focused on product knowledge struggle to refine their messaging to what customers actually need to hear, because tea nerds love wading through the details.

New consumers need to know how and when to drink tea.

The cold-brew customer is an easy example, speaking directly to the preppers. Those who pack their lunch, make overnight oats, and wake up with a system. Steep a full pitcher of tea the night before, refrigerate it, and their day’s refreshment is ready. It’s a simple message compared to “this Taiwanese oolong from Alishan has a delicate floral finish with notes of orchid and butter,” which is accurate but unhelpful for a first-time tea drinker.

The office worker who moves from meeting to meeting with a six-minute window between them needs a bio break and strong black teabags that keep them sharp and steep well in lukewarm water from the pump thermos, not a gong fu set. The sober-curious drinker wants complexity and ritual without alcohol. A wind-down hojicha at nine o’clock solves that. Lead with simplicity and let them come back later for the terroir story and processing details.

Tea is the most versatile terroir-based beverage in the world. But tea merchants so often inject confusion by thinking education is the entry ticket. Tea brands must condense tea into a single, clear occasion. Accepting that most people won’t care that white tea is traditionally from Fujian province stings when you’ve spent years learning that, but it’s the truth. It won’t help tea capture more share of throat.

Customers are often eager to tell you what they need, the tea industry just rarely listens.

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Amendment note, July 15, 2026: An earlier version of this piece used Camellia Sinensis as an example of a model that is hard to replicate and still fell short of solving tea's education problem. That wasn't a fair read of the shop, and it wasn't accurate. Camellia Sinensis moves much of its volume without any tea education attached at all, through wholesale and private-label. I've rewritten the piece to reflect that.

Pajú sits on a quiet street in Porto, well outside the city center. Open from 8 PM until 1 AM, it’s an institution serving the needs of late-night shift workers. It’s the type of restaurant that doesn’t advertise, with an informal, cozy interior. The modest restaurant has a bar and a few tables, and the owner greets you, serving food that tastes like it came from a home kitchen, because it largely did. My partner and I dined there by way of an obscure recommendation. We got seated, chose a few dishes, and asked the owner to suggest a bottle of wine. He disappeared into the back with a barely noticeable smirk and returned cradling a bottle of, in our view, rather commercial white wine: a bottle of Bons Ares Branco from Ramos Pinto. Not obscure or precious on the surface. He set it down and, with welling emotion, told us about the original owner. He was an old friend, a man who, beyond running a winery, poured himself into serving his Douro community beyond the bottom line. He spoke with the quiet pride of someone recommending a well-respected person, not a mere product.

The bottle wasn’t even uncorked, and I already knew we’d love it.

Taste isn’t a neutral act. It’s a construction of hundreds of cues, assembled in real time by the brain from sensory signals, setting, context, story, expectation, and price. Even the face of the person serving you likely impacts the perception of flavor. I’ve thought about this often, as it has huge implications for the tea industry, and any specialty product, really. I loved the wine we drank at Pajú, but I’ll never recreate the experience because a bottle in isolation wouldn’t land the same. There’s real evidence to back this up.

The wine industry has probed this research longer than tea has and even coined the term “marketing placebo effect.” Admittedly, it’s a rather dry term for such a complex phenomenon, but the premise and implications are important for the tea industry. A 2008 study from researchers at Caltech demonstrated that people not only said a wine tasted better at $90, but showed measurably higher activity in the region of the brain associated with experienced pleasure when compared to the exact same wine listed at $10. A later study from the University of Bonn refined and replicated this finding, cementing that the brain’s valuation system translates price information into actual sensory reward. It goes beyond price, too. A French researcher presented identical wine in two separate bottles with accompanying stories, one with a mid-range Bordeaux label and the other a prestigious grand cru. Participants described the wines differently, the former registering as “short, light, and faulty,” while the grand cru was “woody, complex, and round.”

Tea, like wine, is a terroir-based product with almost infinite varieties and price points. It’s not difficult to draw parallels and expect similar results. The available English research specifically on the marketing placebo effect in tea is sparse. What exists outside of lab settings is anecdotal and informal, but worth noting. A widely shared Reddit thread documented an informal blind tasting of six familiar UK black tea brands: Twinings, Yorkshire Tea, Tetley, PG Tips, Ty-Phoo, and ASDA Essentials, the private-label, budget option. ASDA Essentials ranked first. PG Tips came fourth, described as obnoxiously bitter. Anyone familiar with the UK market knows exactly how those brands are ranked in the public imagination, and it didn’t hold up blind. Certainly branding and marketing efforts impact consumer perception of tea, but in the specialty segment, I’ve found that price usually correlates with accepted quality standards. I say accepted because I believe quality is relative to each consumer and their preferences: there is no bad tea. We already know that stressors like altitude, shading, and insect damage demonstrably impact the chemical composition of tea leaves, which translates to a more premium liquor commanding a higher price. But chemical potential isn’t the same as guaranteed experience.

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The grocery aisles in North America tell you everything about the mass-market tea preferences here. Black tea, green tea, herbal blends, and maybe a couple of matcha options dominate the shelves. Oolong tea is a rarity outside of an Asian market. A bottle of Ito En oolong might sit, room temperature, on the bottom shelf in the Asian section of a mainstream grocery store. I find it odd, because by almost every measure of what Western consumers tend to prefer in tea, oolong should be a winning category (though I still hold to my belief that tea types don’t really matter to consumers, yet our industry can’t seem to shake it).

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It’s typically less astringent than black tea and less vegetal than green. The flavor range is staggering, from the light, floral, almost honey-like character of a lightly oxidized type to the deep caramel and toasted grain notes of roasted varieties. It also tends to be sweeter and smoother than black and green tea. If you designed a tea category from scratch for a market that gravitates toward approachable flavors and sweetness, you would end up somewhere close to oolong. And yet, it’s nowhere to be found.

My first theory is linguistic. Every major tea category in the Western lexicon gives the consumer something to grasp. White, green, yellow, black, dark: these are colors (or hues), tangible anchors that at least imply something about what’s in the cup. Oolong offers nothing here. It’s a romanization of the Chinese name, loosely translated as black dragon, which is evocative and romantic in one context and utterly ambiguous in another. A consumer standing in the grocery aisle isn’t drawn to a product that isn’t relatable. Oolong, as much as tea enthusiasts love it, doesn’t have a name that sells.

For better or worse, there’s already a precedent for renaming a tea category to suit Western markets. What the Chinese originally called red tea, or hong cha, was promptly renamed black tea by the British, presumably because the dry leaf, not the liquor, looked black to European eyes. The rename stuck so thoroughly that most Western consumers have no idea red tea and black tea refer to the same tea type. One of oolong’s traditional names is blue tea, or qing cha, a reference to the blue-green color of the partially oxidized leaf. It’s not quite accurate, but at least it lends something tangible to consumers. Heck, if North America can sell blue raspberry, why not blue tea?

My second theory is structural. Oolong is expensive and labor-intensive to produce relative to black or green tea. The partial oxidation that defines the category requires careful, time-sensitive monitoring during processing that’s difficult to standardize. You cannot automate your way to a good oolong the way you can with CTC black tea. Lower production volumes and higher costs mean less shelf presence, thinner retail margins, and fewer marketing dollars.

The other issue is available formats. Oolong traditionally includes larger, more mature leaves, and one of the genuine pleasures of drinking it is watching those leaves unfurl over multiple infusions in a gaiwan or a clay pot. That experience is incompatible with a paper teabag. Pyramid bags help, but only partially, and the brands selling oolong in pyramid bags are niche by definition.

I think the realistic path forward for oolong in North America is in ready-to-drink formats. Oolong brews cleanly, holds well in cold formats, and its flavor diversity makes it a natural base for sparkling teas, pure infusions, and fermented drinks like kombucha. The category’s depth and roasted variants in particular could ride the momentum that hojicha has built among consumers who want something beyond green or black. Roasted oolong and hojicha are not far apart in character, and hojicha has already done some of the consumer education.

Will oolong ever get the sustained commercial push behind black and green tea? Or is its destiny solely to cater to gong fu enthusiasts?

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Blood trailed down my ankle, soaking the edge of my sock. I didn’t feel it, but the evidence was clear. “Leeches aren’t harmful,” said our guide, “but they look nasty.” I’m not sure if the bite was actually painless or if I was simply awestruck by my surroundings, but I couldn’t have cared less about the minor injury. I was seeking tea in the foothills of the Himalayas.

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We were hiking to one of the more remote plots on the Jun Chiyabari tea estate in Eastern Nepal, humbled by our guide’s nimbleness in flip-flop sandals while we stumbled along in brand new hiking boots. Rather than one large plantation, Jun Chiyabari’s plots are nestled seamlessly into clearings, so the entire estate grows in patches along the hillside, connected through a trail network. More accurately, these are muddy footpaths hemmed in by jungle on every side. There was no mass clearing to make room for tea, which reduces erosion, and the estate has been farmed organically from the start, receiving certification not long after its inception. The land sits between 1,650 and 2,200 meters in altitude, just 115 kilometers south of Mount Everest.

The Nepalese tea industry is slowly staking its claim on the global stage, with the help of forward-thinking producers like Bachan and Lochan Gyawali, who established Jun Chiyabari in 2000. The brand truly came into its own in 2012, marked by its first certified organic export. Nepalese tea has long lived in the shadow of Darjeeling, and even today, a significant volume of green tea leaves is exported to Darjeeling to be processed and sold under the more recognized name. Many of the specialty teas produced in Nepal are exceptional and, in particular, well-suited to the North American palate. They tend to be sweeter and softer compared to the sharp astringency and high floral notes typical of Darjeeling. The Himalayas, without question, are a mecca for tea, and that’s precisely why I was there, trudging up muddy tracks with a leech on my ankle.

Tea is tactile, and unlike buying most other products, buyers should see and experience where it comes from. I was fortunate to be part of a small group from my employer, sent to Nepal in 2017 to document our experience and source another tea for our growing assortment. We spent two nights at the estate, taking in the garden views and the sounds and smells of production, and tasting extraordinary teas. We identified a curly spring green tea as the top candidate, though each one had its own merit.

Working in the tea industry isn’t without its challenges, but it certainly has its rewards. Spending time with producers and experiencing the journey from root to cup is grounding and keeps us connected to what we do. Tea is nurtured by the environment but crafted by human hands. When we drink it, we’re tasting its terroir, but only because someone carefully labored to capture it.

I’m always amazed that tea is simply dried leaves and water, a beverage so basic yet somehow infinitely complex.

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Are you a pre-revenue or early-stage tea founder seeking support?

The Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle is for you. Our members-only community supports tea entrepreneurs creating sustainable and scalable tea businesses. Membership starting at $99 per month could save you thousands of dollars and lost time. Check out the details here, or reach out at billy@bdhconsultants.com to learn more.

Tea’s supply chain is riddled with intermediaries. Some provide genuine added value; others, perhaps not. Shortening supply chains generally passes savings on to retailers and consumers while (ideally) leaving more margin for farmers. In the Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle, our community launchpad for pre-revenue and early-stage tea entrepreneurs, sourcing is one of the most discussed topics. One category of intermediary stands out as essential for keeping the leaf tea industry accessible to new entrants. Tea co-packers. They silently provide the foundation for hundreds of thousands of tea brands to flourish worldwide. Even large, established multinational brands rely on co-packers for complex production responsibilities while focusing their own efforts on sales, distribution, customer service, and general operations. So, what do they actually do?

If I had to sum up the role of tea co-packers in one sentence, it would be “tea co-packers make the world of tea accessible to brands by delivering safe, consistent products in both taste and format.”

Tea blending is a primary role for nearly all co-packers, and it is far more involved than mixing ingredients in a bowl. Companies maintain inventories of up to 600 to 1,000 different ingredients sourced from 30 to 40 countries. Apple pieces from Turkey, chamomile from Egypt, black tea from India, lemongrass from Thailand, cornflower petals from Albania, vanilla from Madagascar, and flavoring from Switzerland. Each ingredient carries its own supply chain, seasonal availability, quality variations, and cost fluctuations. Co-packers craft blends for dozens or hundreds of clients’ brands, each with its own recipes and specifications, and every blend must taste identical whether a customer buys it today or three years from now.

Maintaining that consistency requires extraordinary coordination. Consider dried apple pieces alone. A large blender might receive them ten times a year, each delivery requiring its own tasting and evaluation. Multiply that across 1,000 ingredients, many of which appear in 100 or more different blends, and the scale becomes staggering. Tea blenders must assess ingredients in isolation but also consider how any variation will ripple through every blend that uses them and whether adjustments are needed to keep their profiles steady.

The actual blending process adds another layer of precision. Blending machines come in many sizes and configurations, but essentially, they combine individual ingredients into a homogenous blend while preserving their integrity. Ingredients are combined in a carefully structured recipe, typically adding lighter and more fragile ingredients last. Whole rosebuds, for example, added too early would be crushed to powder during mixing, potentially ruining the entire batch. Once blending is complete, co-packers package the product to a brand’s exact specifications. Teabags, stand-up pouches, tubes, tins, and bulk bags are common options, meaning a brand can move from custom recipe to finished, shelf-ready product under one roof.

All of this operational complexity has a direct bearing on cost. Tea blenders negotiate with suppliers and gardens to secure the best prices, often through long-term contracts or large-volume commitments. Every ingredient travels from somewhere, and consolidating purchases saves money on freight. Volume and urgency determine whether a shipment travels by land, sea, or air, and whether insurance is warranted. Every country adds its own customs charges. None of this has anything to do with how the tea tastes, yet all of it shapes what brands pay and, ultimately, what consumers pay.

Very few startups have the capital to build a facility that meets modern food safety standards from day one, and even large brands think twice before investing in full-on production. When brands partner with a co-packer, they are essentially renting a multi-million dollar infrastructure. Without this partnership, most founders are left trying to scale a kitchen-side hobby, a move that could end in a regulatory nightmare.

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Undoubtedly, tea takes a backseat to both coffee and wine in North America’s beverage hierarchy. Coffee and wine both have entrenched rituals and associated norms in the culture. People know when, where, how, and why to consume both. Tea became relegated to fancy dress-up parties, a highly-sweetened soda alternative, or a comforting companion for sickness. This really undersells the versatility of tea. And ironically, that may be holding it back from a hockey stick growth curve.

Coffee and wine, both celebrated and respected representatives of terroir, are single-ingredient products: roasted seeds of the Coffea genus, and the fermented juice of Vitis vinifera. Both are extraordinary in their own right and, rightfully, cemented their place in consumers’ minds. True tea is exclusively the processed leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, but effectively, the category stretches well beyond this. Mint, chamomile, rooibos, hibiscus, lemongrass, maté, spices of all kinds, flowers like lavender, and roots like ginger all fall under the umbrella of tea for the majority of consumers in North America (and possibly to the chagrin of tea purists). So, what is tea? That’s a tough question to answer truthfully, but the trends dictate that tea encompasses any herb, plant, root, or seed (aside from coffee) steeped in hot water. Even before trying an initial sip, consumers must navigate a seemingly endless selection of plant matter. Tea arguably has the most variety of any category, but also the most complexity.

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Once tea reaches the kitchen, the level of control consumers have is genuinely remarkable. Water temperature, steeping time, and the amount and cut of leaf you use can all shift the character of a single tea dramatically. A short, gentle steep of Earl Grey produces something bright and delicate, but steep it longer and pour it over ice, and it’s a completely different beverage. Add milk, honey, or lemon, and the combinations multiply further. Take a traditional Chinese oolong and brew it western-style in a large teapot, then brew the same leaves gong fu-style in a small yixing vessel with multiple short infusions, and it may as well be a completely different tea. Coffee enthusiasts rightly celebrate the variables of grind size, brew ratio, and extraction time, but they’re still working within the boundaries of one core ingredient. Tea drinkers get those same variables plus a nearly unlimited assortment of ingredients and flavor combinations.

Tea fits into any lifestyle with ease, spanning every hour of the day, mood, and location that coffee and wine simply can’t. Highly caffeinated matcha holds its own against coffee’s notorious morning buzz. Yet chamomile, rooibos, or even hojicha makes the perfect evening companion. Decaffeinated coffee exists, sure, but most coffee lovers admit the extra processing takes something with it. Wine carries cultural prestige, but with it, alcohol. It’s unsuitable for most daytime occasions, professional settings, or those abstaining. Tea doesn’t have these restrictions. From the boardroom to the daycare to the last page of that book at 11 pm, tea pairs with equal grace.

Versatility may be tea’s greatest strength, but also the very thing slowing its mass adoption in North American culture. Psychologists call it decision paralysis. Well-stocked tea shops easily carry over a hundred unique types and blends, which intimidates many would-be consumers. Coffee culture sidesteps this problem by offering familiar rituals and clear entry points, no matter the quality or price point. Wine does something similar through established varietals, regional conventions, and its deep roots in dining culture. Those accepted norms aren’t limitations so much as handrails, and handrails are useful tools for leading consumers.

North American tea culture doesn’t yet have any handrails. Consumers need a simple, predictable outcome tailored to their needs, and easy ways to incorporate tea into their lives. Tea snobs love the complexity it offers (I should know). But leading with complexity overwhelms casual drinkers. Let’s give them a straightforward reason to drink tea, a reason to return for it, and simple maps to guide them. The versatility will reveal itself. It always does.

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Are you a pre-revenue or early-stage tea founder seeking support?

The Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle is for you. Our members-only community supports tea entrepreneurs creating sustainable and scalable tea businesses. Membership starting at $99 per month could save you thousands of dollars and lost time. Check out the details here, or reach out at billy@bdhconsultants.com to learn more.

Most people probably don’t think about counterfeit tea. When we hear about fake goods, our minds immediately jump to luxury handbags, designer sneakers, or pirated DVDs and games. But tea? That humble dried leaf sitting in your pantry? It is a quietly profitable sector for counterfeiting, and the implications run deeper than you might expect.

The first time I encountered this issue was on my first trip to Taiwan in 2014. I was visiting with a friend, and we rented scooters to drive into Nantou County, destined for the famous growing region of Alishan. We stopped at one of many tea shops along the mountain road, and the host graciously poured us samples. But something was off. The tea didn’t look or taste like quality Taiwanese tea should. After a few pointed questions about the teas via Google Translate, something sparked in the shop owner’s eyes. He swept away everything he’d been serving, disappeared to the back, and returned with an entirely different tray, brimming with new teas. These second teas actually tasted and looked like authentic Taiwanese tea, with that intense floral, buttery, almost rubbery quality.

That moment perfectly captures the reality of counterfeit tea. It’s not always about sophisticated fraud schemes or international crime rings. Sometimes it’s just tea shop owners along tourist routes who stock cheaper alternatives to keep the lights on, waiting to offer the real stuff when asked the right questions.

The Types of Tea Fraud

Before we dive deeper, it’s worth distinguishing between the two main types of fraudulent tea in the market. Counterfeit tea occurs when a product is mislabeled or misrepresented. Think Vietnamese oolong sold as premium Taiwanese high-mountain tea, or Nepalese black tea repackaged as authentic Darjeeling. The tea itself is usually perfectly good and safe to drink, but you’re paying a premium for an origin story that isn’t true.

A recent case in Scotland shows how brazen this fraud can be. Someone was selling tea labeled as Scottish-grown when most of it wasn’t actually from Scotland at all. This person was convicted and sentenced to three and a half years in jail after selling over £500,000 worth of fake Scottish tea.

I was recently featured on the Specialty Matcha Podcast. Our conversation prompted me to update this post with a new section on matcha fraud, which you can find behind the paywall. This often involves matcha sold under a false origin, like matcha grown and processed in China but marketed as Japanese. In other cases, raw materials like tencha are imported into Japan for processing and then sold as a Japanese product.

Adulterated tea is different. What you’re buying isn’t actually tea at all, or it’s been mixed with fillers to increase volume and profit margins. Historically, this was rampant when tea first arrived in Europe as an expensive luxury good. Unscrupulous merchants mixed real tea leaves with everything from vegetable matter to minerals.

A book published in 1896 by Joseph M. Walsh, Tea Blending as a Fine Art, includes an entire chapter on adulteration and detection methods. The first line states: “The teas of commerce are subject to three principal forms of adulteration: facing or coloring with deleterious compounds to enhance their appearance, mixing with spurious and spent or once used leaves with the object of increasing their bulk, and sanding or adulterating with mineral matter to add to their weight.”

Though much less prevalent today, the practice hasn’t disappeared. In 2024, Indian authorities shut down a factory producing and distributing fake tea powder across the entire country. The operators used various dyes to make their product look darker and more authentic than it actually was. When you consider that this adulterated tea was being distributed nationwide, the scope of consumer impact becomes staggering.

While adulteration still occurs, counterfeit tea appears to be the larger and more pervasive issue in today’s market. Recent cases and seizures suggest that mislabeling and misrepresentation have become more common than outright adulteration, and the scale is immense.

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I used to be genuinely conflicted about what made tea good. In my early tea blogging circles, quality had a single, unambiguous definition: the top-tier, single-origin pinnacle of any given style or region. Nothing else warranted serious attention.

My tea tasting and writing life began in high school on a Blogspot site called Sir William Of The Leaf. The writers shaping my thinking were long-time specialists, each devoted to their narrow corner of the tea world. One wrote exclusively on sheng pu’erh, another on dancong oolong, and others praised Japanese or Korean greens. My palate was just beginning to unfold, and I was content to let these tea blogging titans chart my course. If the veterans agreed that a particular tea was the definitive expression of its category or terroir, I believed them without question, scraping together whatever spare money I had for a 25-gram sample.

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My verdicts were rarely clear. I remember purchasing a highly regarded sheng pu’erh cake, convinced it would be a transformative experience. Scale, pu’erh pick, and yixing pot at the ready, I followed the prescribed instructions with precision. The result was thoroughly underwhelming. I tossed the infusion and tried again. Another dud. This was hard-earned lawn-mowing money, and I was determined to find a steep worth the investment.

That was sixteen years ago. The cake still sits in a wooden box alongside others. It still disappoints.

So what is quality, exactly? What does it mean for a tea to be good or bad? The more tea I drink across more contexts, the more I suspect the framing is the problem. Categorizing teas as good or bad creates rifts where there should be connections.

I woke one morning in a spare room at a small mountain inn in Chiayi, Taiwan, surrounded on all sides by tea fields. The modest accommodation was run by a local woman who rented out rooms in her house to the occasional trekking tea buyer. I had stayed at similar places across the island and knew the rhythm well enough to wait for the boxed breakfast that always came. A steamed egg sandwich, obligatory rice, and sauteed field vegetables. That morning, the owner also set out a small pitcher of Taiwanese black tea from Sun Moon Lake. There couldn’t have been a better accompaniment.

We met up with our guide, and he asked about our morning. “You really liked the tea they serve there?! I think it’s just awful,” he responded, assuring us we’d be tasting much better tea with him. That was true, of course, but his attitude missed the point entirely. The innkeeper had chosen something thoughtful for her guests, prepared it with care, and offered it freely. The tea served that morning perfectly. That, I think, is the more honest measure of quality.

All tea can be good tea, provided it is produced ethically and without harm to the people or land involved. Fine-cut tea serves the masses, brewing up fast, bold cups that carry people through their mornings. Smoky gunpowder green tea, packed with fresh mint and sugar, fuels commerce in Moroccan medinas. Canned, tea-based drinks help ease people away from sugar-laden alternatives. If more people are drinking tea, in whatever format and at whatever price point, that ultimately supports the broader industry and the growers within it.

The sheng pu’erh cake in the wooden box still doesn’t excite me. But I don’t think that says anything particularly important about the tea.

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Are you a pre-revenue or early-stage tea founder seeking support?

The Steep Insights: Founder’s Circle is for you. Our members-only community supports tea entrepreneurs creating sustainable and scalable tea businesses. Membership starting at $99 per month could save you thousands of dollars and lost time. Check out the details here, or reach out at billy@bdhconsultants.com to learn more.

If you’ve spent time browsing specialty tea aisles or following new brands lately, you’ve probably noticed this shift. Marketing buzzwords like “clean,” “pure,” and “all-natural” are everywhere, and organic tea is all the rage. The market is projected to hit $3.25 billion by 2032, and it’s not hard to see why, given tea’s perceived health halo and clean-label appeal.

The story on the surface is promising: cleaner tea, well-managed land, and less environmental impact. However, the full story offers a very different perspective. The thought of producing higher-priced specialty organic tea is alluring, but for some smallholder farmers across the world, the organic label is an economic trap. In many cases, the organic premium consumers pay at the register isn’t trickling down the supply chain.

The Yield

The economic struggle of organic tea starts with the soil. Conventional farming depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to encourage the rapid growth of young tea shoots. Organic tea farmers must rely on slower-release fertilizers like compost, manure, and biochar to deliver key nutrients. The result? On average, organic agriculture yields about 25% less output than conventional farming.

In South India, an early adopter of organic production, the numbers aren’t promising. Estate productivity dropped from 1,287 kg per hectare in 2010 to just 868 kg per hectare in 2022. This loss is attributed to nutrient limitations, weed control, and pest management. In addition, farmers have difficulties accessing premium pricing in export markets due to certification complexities. The yield loss is a direct hit to their bottom line. When fixed costs like land management, administration, and infrastructure are spread over a significantly smaller harvest, the cost of producing each kilogram increases fast.

A study comparing the revenues of organic and conventional tea farmers in Northern Vietnam found that organic adopters earned more per hectare on average. However, research in India, Sri Lanka, and China revealed that even with increased earnings, farmers still could not support themselves solely through organic tea cultivation. While profitable organic tea farming was shown to be viable after 10 years, it required heavy investment in specialized education. These findings do not account for the conversion phase, which often leaves farmers at a deficit for years due to lower yields and lack of access to organic price premiums. Unless farmers receive higher prices or financial aid for the transition, the spreadsheets don’t paint a good picture.

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