If you’ve been following this blog for the past two years or so, you’ve probably heard me mention Infused by Henrietta Lovell as a tea book I really enjoy (I’ve also recommended it to quite a few people offline as well). So today, I’m really excited to bring you the SustainabiliTEA profile of Rare Tea Company, Henrietta’s tea brand.
What is the Rare Tea Company?
Rare Tea Company was started in 2004 to source and supply the world’s best loose leaf teas! Not only do they sell their teas online, they also sell to retail shops and the HORECA industry. They supply the hospitality industry across the world from coffee shops and cafés like Butchers Daughter in Venice Beach California, to Hotels like Claridges in London, to 3 Michelin star restaurants like Noma in Copenhagen.
Currently, they are a team of 10 people who source and transport tea from across the world- with all the paperwork and logistic that involves, then pack and supply direct to customers in hotels, restaurants, bars, cafes, shops and online. One thing I really liked is that not everyone in their team has a background in tea – it’s the personality (love for tea) and ability that matters.
I’ve actually tried quite a few of Rare Tea Company’s teas and tisanes (I really love their rooibos!) and if you’re curious about their teas, you can find my reviews here.
Planet: How Rare Tea Company is Sourcing Responsibly
Choosing partners for tea
The first thing I asked Henrietta was about how Rare Tea Company sourced their tea. Unsurprisingly, Rare Tea Company’s sourcing policies support the planet and people and all the farms are vetted to make sure they support three pillars of sustainability. First, let’s talk about sourcing tea and the environment (we’ll talk about the community in the next section).
One thing Rare Tea Company does is to work with farms that are committed to the long term health of the soil, environment and community. This goes beyond screening farms for organic farming measures like not using pesticides and herbicides; Rare Tea Company also supports farms that invest in regenerative agriculture like biodiversification and tree planting. Regenerative agriculture helps to protect the tea, the environment and the soil structure from the changes brought on by the climate crisis (such most significantly drought and flooding).
Reducing their carbon footprint
Apart from sourcing, Rare Tea Company also looks at other areas of their business to make sure they’re minimising their carbon footprint. Right now, their head of operations Kathi is leading a project to improve their packaging!
Packaging isn’t the only thing that contributes to the carbon footprint. Henrietta shared about the impact of single-use teabags. In her own words:
“Think of the forests of trees cut down to make single-use teabags. Think of the precious natural resources used to make even the most biodegradable tea bags? Think of the bleaches, glues, nano plastics and industrial chemicals used to produce teabags. Corn or trees don’t turn into paper or plastic “silken” mesh by magic. And the chemicals used don’t disappear by magic – they get into the water supply and they get into us. And then think of the carbon used to make them? A teapot is the simple, beautiful solution we can all embrace to reduce teas carbon footprint.”
Because of this, Rare Tea Company only sells loose leaf teas and not teabags. From shopping on their online store, I see that there is also the option to just get the tea in a pouch (not a pouch and tin) so if you already have your own storage methods for tea, you can reduce the amount of packaging by just ordering the pouch.
People: How Rare Tea Company is working with various communities
In the previous section, I talked about how Rare Tea Company has three pillars of sustainability that they make sure they support when they choose farms to work with. Here, I want to talk about the other two pillars and what it means for the various communities Rare Tea Company works with.
Buying Direct
First, Rare Tea Company buys direct from the farm, not from brokers and middle men. This ensures the value of the tea goes to the people who make it and not to the shareholders of the seven or so multinational businesses that control over 90% of tea sales across Europe and North America through a network of subsidiaries. Additionally, they pay what the farmer asks, not a commodity price, and although this means it costs more to buy the tea, it also means that the farmer has more money to invest in their farms and their families.
Rare Charity
Second, they support social sustainability by returning a percentage of their revenue (not profit) to Rare Charity, which was set up to support long term, sustainable change on their partner farms. Henrietta asked the partners she worked with where they would like to invest a percentage of tea revenue- and they said in their children. Because the educational opportunities in those communities are very poor (but talent is not!), Rare Charity supports educational scholarships.
Rare Charity is a completely independent charitable body and it started its activities in Malawi, where the need is greatest. It is now expanding further afield, so be sure to follow them and keep up with what is happening.
By the way, one of the Rare Charity partners is the Satemwa Tea Estate, who I profiled in this post.
Education
Sine I’ve read Infused, I also wanted to know what Henrietta’s thoughts are on tea education and sustainability. I started this series because I wanted to share about all these amazing farms so that people who want great, sustainably grown tea know where to get it and who they are supporting. Since Rare Tea Company also does workshops, I had a feeling that we might agree on this topic. Her response:
“The problem of high quality, high value tea is not supply. Its demand. It’s my lifelong and daily ambition to change consumer thinking. I do talks and seminars across the world at food symposium, universities, The UN, online, I speak on the radio and TV. I stay up late on Friday nights answering emails! – because I absolutely believe that communication is the key to changing the world, a little but for the better.“
I love the passion in her response!
Bonus: HORECA, B2C and going direct
Since Rare Tea Company is the first tea company that I’m talking to who also talked about their HORECA business, I wanted to ask more about that. In general, I love going direct to farms because that way I know I’m supporting the farms, but at the same time, I also see the value in a tea brand that curates the teas for me.
Henrietta explained that for HORECA customers, they don’t have the time or money to handle the logistics of shipping as well as investing in the harvests from the tea farms. The farmers have huge costs to run a tea farm and families and communities to feed so they need to sell all of their harvested tea as fast as possible. For cafes or hotels or restaurants that may not be able to predict exactly how much tea they need at the time of order, this can be a tricky task.
The difference between Rare Tea Company and a regular broke is that they buy from a farm, building a long term sustainable relationship with the farmer. Many other companies blend and package tea from a third party broker, so the tea passes through multiple companies before arriving at the final customer.
Where can you find Rare Tea Company?
If this post has piqued your curiosity about Rare Tea Company, the best place to start is with their website! I personally really liked their Discovery Box, which is a good way to sample their teas without having to buy a lot of tea at one go. Henrietta also shared their #teachange page with me, and it’s worth a read if you’re interested in reading more about the mission of Rare Tea Company.
And of course, if you like books (and I assume you do, given that more than 50% of this blog is about books), I cannot recommend Henrietta’s book Infused highly enough! It’s a wonderful love letter to tea and I really enjoyed reading it!
The discovery box sounds really interesting!
It is! And this company is local(ish) to you so you could try it out too, if you’re interested!