• Pandemic Powers Organic Sales


    The Organic Trade Association reports that US sales of organic food and beverages set a record in 2020, growing 12.4% to $62 billion. The total includes organic food, which grew by 12.8% to $56.4 billion. Import values for green tea also spiked, increasing 28% compared to 2019. Organic certified foods now account for almost 6% of total US food sales.


    organic foods

    Green Tea Import Values Jump as Much as 40%

    The pandemic caused consumer dollars to shift almost overnight from restaurants and carry-out to groceries, with traditional staples and pantry and freezer items flying off the shelves, according to OTA, “the only thing that constrained growth in the organic food sector was supply.”

    “Across all the organic categories, growth was limited by supply, causing producers, distributors, retailers and brands to wonder where numbers would have peaked if supply could have been met!” said Angela Jagiello, Director of OTA Education & Insights.

    In 2020 the declared value of organic green tea, shipped in packages of less than three kilos, spiked 40% to $24.5 million. The declared value for organic green shipped in bulk increased 21% compared to 2019. The declared value of all categories of green tea, when combined, rose 28%, according to USDA, FAS data.

    Organic green tea volume increased 11% to 2.1 million kilos. Sales of organic black tea in teabags grew 19% to 879,100 kilos.

    Grocers benefited overall during the pandemic as food sales in restaurants declined. In almost every organic food aisle, demand jumped by near-record levels, according to OTA.

    Organic’s reputation of being better for you and the planet positioned it for dramatic growth, according to the association. OTA’s annual survey, conducted January through March 2021, confirms the trend toward premium offerings and more practical comfort. Sales of frozen and canned fruits and vegetables grew by 28%. Fresh organic produce sales rose by nearly 11% $18.2 billion.

    Pantry stocking was overwhelmingly the main growth driver in 2020. As bread making and cookie baking took kitchens across the country by storm, sales of organic flours and baked goods grew by 30%.

    “Good, healthy food has never been more important, and consumers have increasingly sought out the Organic label. Organic purchases have skyrocketed as shoppers choose high-quality organic to feed and nourish their families,” said Laura Batcha, CEO and Executive Director of the Organic Trade Association.

    “We’ve seen a great many changes during the pandemic, and some of them are here to stay,” said Batcha. “What’s come out of COVID is a renewed awareness of the importance of maintaining our health, and the important role of nutritious food. For more and more consumers, that means organic. We’ll be eating in restaurants again, but many of us will also be eating and cooking more at home. We’ll see more organic everywhere – in the stores and on our plates.”

    Organic food sales are not expected to continue at 2020’s fast rate but it’s anticipated that the grocery channel will get a lasting lift from the pandemic for the foreseeable future as many consumers continue to cook more at home.

    Learn more: Organic Trade Organization


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  • Tea Biz Podcast | Episode 19

    Hear the Headlines

    | Tea History Collection Unveiled
    | Indian Commodities Logjam
    | THIRST Undertakes a Tea Human Rights Analysis
    | A Series of Major Quakes Rattle Yunnan

    Seven-minute News Recap

    India Tea Price Watch | Sale 19

    Features

    Tea Biz this week travels to Nepal to meet Aasha Bhandari the newly named International Trade and Promotion Executive at the Himalayan Tea Producers Cooperative

    …and to the North Carolina campus of Wake Forest University to learn from student William Liu why ancient teas and rituals retain their appeal with young people.

    Nepal Tea Garden
    Nepal is expanding the country’s tea growing regions to produce more specialty loose leaf tea.

    Himalaya Tea Opportunity

    Nepal Increases Production of Quality Specialty Teas

    By Aravinda Anantharaman | Bengaluru

    Nepal’s tea industry reported record sales in 2020. The fabled tea land is growing greater quantities and greater varieties of loose and broken leaf teas thanks to a government-initiated expansion of the industry to high altitude gardens in non-traditional growing areas. Rural agrarian entrepreneurs are redefining offerings for an international market thirsty for the distinct taste of Himalayan grown oolongs, white teas, and premium black whole leaf. In this segment Aasha Bhandari, newly named to promote trade at the Himalayan Tea Producers Cooperative, discusses her plans for HIMCOOP.

    Read more…

    Aasha Bhandari discusses Nepal’s tea industry in transition.
    William Liu
    College sophomore William Liu founded the World Tea Association and To Tea Together podcast.

    Why Ancient Tea Appeals to Young People

    By Dan Bolton

    William Liu is a 20-year-old sophomore at Wake Forest University so inspired by tea that he and his classmates established the World Tea Association on campus and online. The group offers tea discovery and tasting sessions weekly and hosts occasional tea panels with presentations by tea professionals, tea scholars, and tea explorers. The events bring together many who are new to tea, says William “we aim to redefine the tea experience through an interdisciplinary approach and expose the true leaf to a greater audience.”

    In this discussion he describes why tea appeals to young people and explains his view that tea learning is ongoing. “The tea journey has no destination, he says, it involves only intention and lifelong learning.”

    Read more…

    William Liu on advancing our knowledge of the leaf.

    Tea News you Need to Know

    By Dan Bolton

    An extensive private collection of historical tea artifacts and modern facilities for meetings and tea research were unveiled on International Tea Day by Tea Ambassador Mike Bunston, OBE.

    The Tea History Collection, located in Banbury, Oxfordshire in the DCS Group complex, is the inspired work of entrepreneur Denys Shortt, OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). The facility, valued at £100,000 ($140,000) is open by appointment to tea-related organizations and academia. It is equipped with a tasting bar, high-speed internet, archive cabinets, a video-conference room and work areas.

    Shortt, who founded DCS in 1994, grew up on a tea estate in Assam. His family worked at gardens there for 20 years before moving to Africa where his father managed the Ikumbi Tea Factory in Thika, Kenya.

    “We do not believe there is anything like this in the world,” says Shortt. “We have items from Plantation House (now demolished) which was where the London Tea Auctions were held.” The collection of more than 500 items includes teas, books,  and sample cabinet with 200 tins containing teas dating to 1904. The collection will be maintained as a non-profit.

    Learn more….

    Commodities Logjam

    Fifty thousand in West Bengal are homeless this week due to a tropical cyclone that halted air traffic and port activity in Calcutta. Every link of India’s tea supply chain is under stress. Restrictions to stop the spread of COVID-19 are once again limiting the number of harvest workers in the gardens and reducing by half staffing at factories processing tea, while simultaneously forcing the cancellation of tea auctions… delaying transport and causing local warehouses to overflow.

    Truckers essential to transporting tea were virtually halted last year and while many delivering to cities face delays due to curfews that prevent unloading at night, local transport is much less problematic in 2021.

    The weak link in the commodities supply chain during the second wave are buyers who cannot easily judge what quantities are required for manufacturers and to meet varying retail demand. For example, Kochi-based spices trader Kishor Shamji told the Hindu Businessline that a lack of buying interest from masala manufacturers in upcountry markets has affected the sales of almost all spices, including pepper, cardamom, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. Meanwhile, traders worry that the tea they purchase to send overseas will experience costly shipping fees and delays. Last year’s first wave dealt urban areas the hardest blow but in 2021 it is rural areas that suffer.

    Biz Insight – In India, as in many countries, mandatory lockdowns and health concerns have accelerated sales of tea. A survey of 22,000 rural small market stores known collectively as Kirana revealed a 140% increase in tea sales. Sales of hand sanitizers that appeared near the top of the list last year are flat but sales of soap increased by 50%, according to StoreKing. Pest and mosquito repellent experienced a 200% increase and comfort snacks and biscuits are up 83%.

    Assessing Human Rights in Tea

    THIRST The International Round Table for Sustainable Tea, is launching a three-year program to analyze the root causes of human rights breaches in the tea industry and come up with an action plan for how to solve them.

    Founder Sabita Banerji objects to “rights assessments” which have a negative connotation she favors an “impact analysis.” Banerji calls it a ‘constructive solution-oriented approach’.

    The program will document conditions for workers and farmers and identify problems “but more importantly, what can be done to address these problems,” said Banerji. The first step is to consolidate existing research and then conduct in-depth studies where there are gaps, providing a global picture of the interdependencies of tea.

    Read more on the Tea Biz blog.

    A Series of Major Quakes Rattle Yunnan

    Three major earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks damaged 14,000 structures, killed three people and seriously injured 28 in Yunnan Province last week. The first in the series struck Dali located near the heart of the tea growing region. That deadly 6.0 magnitude quake on Tuesday was followed Friday by a much stronger 6.4 quake that damaged homes and forced rescuers to pull several people from under debris. Five hours later a 7.4 temblor located in adjacent Yangbi [YANg BY] rattled Yunnan again.

    The steep mountainous region, subject to landslides, is jittery about quakes. In 2008 a 7.9 earthquake centered in Sichuan province killed 87,000 people and left 4.2 million homeless, causing $150 billion in damage.

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  • Assessing Human Rights in Tea

    THIRST The International Round Table for Sustainable Tea, is launching a three-year program to analyze the root causes of human rights breaches in the tea industry and come up with an action plan for how to solve them. This will take the form of a Human Rights Impact Assessment of the global tea sector.

    Tea workers
    Tea workers experience a range of working conditions from ideal to difficult to inhumane.

    A Solution-Oriented Approach

    By Aravinda Anantharaman

    A Human Rights Impact Assessment is defined by the Danish Institute for Human Rights as “a process for identifying, understanding, assessing and addressing the adverse effects of a business project or business activities on the human rights enjoyment of impacted rightsholders such as workers and community members.” The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights recommend that businesses inform themselves about human rights in their own operations and in their supply chains.

    THIRST founder Sabita Banerji, who also consults with organizations like Oxfam and Living Wage Foundation, writes that “The term ‘Human Rights Impact Assessment’ makes people think of the negatives of what’s happening in human rights, in the supply chain. I prefer to think of it as a human rights impact analysis.”

    The program sets out to look at the conditions for workers and farmers, the cause of problems, and what can be done to address the problems. Banerji calls it a ‘constructive solution-oriented approach’ which has four focus areas:

    • Create an evidence base across tea-growing regions by consolidating available research and identifying under-documented regions.
    • Conduct in-depth studies where there are gaps and provide a global picture of the interdependencies of tea.
    • Interrogate the tea value chain from producer to consumer, and the context within which it operates, to understand what levers and dynamics within the tea trading system might be driving human rights breaches.
    • Convene roundtable meetings of stakeholders in the tea sector to use that evidence to decide what changes are needed and act on them.
    Sabita Banerji
    Sabita Banerji

    “A drought in Kenya will send prices up in India and vice versa. So how can we look at the whole value chain from the producer to the consumer and everyone in between – the traders, the packers, the branders and the retailers, the auction house. How can we look at how trading is done to understand are the dynamics within that value chain and the distribution of value along the chain to see if these are driving some of these breaches of human rights?”

    The program will look into:

    1. The context within which the tea industry functions: the legislative framework, the international standards, the ILO conventions that different countries have signed up for, new laws like the one that will soon be passed by the EU making it compulsory for companies to do human rights due diligence studies in their supply chains, in addition to consumer trends and the role they are playing in drawing ethics and human rights into the conversation on consumption.
    2. Initiatives, programs, and business models, and how they have worked. THIRST will study both experimental and traditional models to see what can be borrowed, replicated, adapted, and scaled to bring systemic change to the industry.
    3. Ways to bring civil society and the industry to look at human rights challenges together, find solutions together, and then work together to put those solutions into practice.

    Central to the program is the dialogue with producers. Adds Banerji, “I think the pattern so far has been for people who are concerned about human rights, raising these issues as they see them but framing it in quite a hostile way. That puts the producers on defensive mode. And I think in any case, the tea industry’s tea estate model was always set up in a very kind of a defensive way. There isn’t a tradition and a culture of listening really. I believe, and I hope, that this study will be able to look into this more and see if it’s true that the producers are themselves trapped in a system, which makes it difficult for them to respect human rights, actually. I’ve often found, in the other Human Rights Impact Assessments that I’ve done, that very often that the problem is that the farmers are not getting sufficient price for their produce to, to be able to fulfil the human rights requirements of their workers or the small farmers supplying them. I suspect the same will be true in the tea sector.”

    The program is ambitious and not without challenges. As Banerji points out, in the past, when activists, academics, or trade unions have pointed to the problems, producers have been defensive. There is a reluctance to engage in dialogue as much of it begins with criticism of their functioning. THIRST’s challenge will be in achieving the balance between earning the trust of companies and balancing that with grassroots activists. “There is a lot of mistrust on both sides. So it’s going to be tricky getting them to a point where they feel they can at least have a conversation with each other and hear each other’s side of the story and point of view to try to find a way to move forward,” she says.

    The program follows a tried and tested model, which begins with:

    Assessment (year 1) : A desk review of available literature to get an understanding of the structure of the industry and the dynamics of its working.
    Analysis (year 2) : Interview people in the industry, including workers, farmers, trade unionists, civil society, campaigners, company managers and owners to understand their perspectives.
    Action (year 3) : As an independently funded human rights assessment, the program will put out a set of recommendations and convene working groups with the industry and civil society to enable these recommendations into action.

    Says Banerji, “While some recommendations will be specific to specific geographies and may result in a working group for that particular country or region, there will be other recommendations that apply globally. And that’s why this is a Human Rights Impact Assessment of the global tea sector. Because all the elements are so interdependent. I think part of the problem up to now is that the issues have been looked at in some narrow geographical way whereas I believe that the root causes of those problems are systemic. They are industry-wide.”

    The program begins in July 2021, and an Advisory Committee will be formed with a representative range of stakeholders from tea-producing countries and tea buying companies.

    THIRST invites civil society, academics, funders, companies and other tea stakeholders to be part of this study, in the following ways:

    1. Become a civil society partner in the study, helping to steer, shape and deliver it with THIRST and other partners 

    2. Contribute research reports and data, conduct new field research in under-studied areas and/or contribute analysis of the global tea market and trading system, take part in roundtable meetings to discuss findings and resulting actions 

    3.Volunteer to share corporate views and information to ensure that the study is well balanced and presents all views fairly and accurately

    4. Become a funder to enable the study to be as deep and far-reaching as possible 

    Contact THIRST via our website: https://thirst.international/contact/ to find out more.


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  • Tea Biz Podcast | Episode 18

    Caption: Tea Forest in the Hawaiian sun near the village of Volcano. Courtesy Tea Hawaii/Eva Lee

    Hear the Headlines

    | International Tea Day Celebrations
    | Assam Forbids Tea Workers to Isolate at Home
    | Nepal’s First Flush is Delayed
    | Kagoshima May Soon Outproduce Shizuoka

    Seven-minute News Recap

    India Tea Price Watch | Sale 19

    Features

    Tea Biz this week travels to the slopes of the Kilauea Volcano where Tea Hawaii Founder Eva Lee describes the ongoing tea harvest as unusually wet and seven weeks later than normal.

    …and then to Massachusetts to learn from author and historian Chitrita Banerji how a simple beverage transformed Indian culture.

    Tea Hawaii owners Eva Lee and Chiu Leong

    Uniquely Hawaiian

    Constant rains delayed Hawaii’s first flush by several weeks

    By Dan Bolton

    Eva Lee is a pioneer of modern tea cultivation in Hawaii, establishing with her husband, Chiu Leong, a tea garden and nursery in the village of Volcano 20 years ago. The farm supplied growers with hearty cultivars first introduced in 2000 by researchers at the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Hawaiian tea is grown on farms producing less than 100 kilos a year. Small amounts of premium tea are exported, but most is purchased by local restaurants and tourists. In this conversation, Lee describes how the “modest but very strong tea industry” adapted during a difficult year. Read more…

    Tea Hawaii co-founder Eva Lee shares details about the 2021 harvest.
    Chitrita Banerji

    Tea is Both Cultural and Personal

    By Aravinda Anantharaman | Bengaluru

    Humans readily adapt to new foods and drink, most with little affect “we make them our own by accepting them and enjoying them” says distinguished food and culture author Chitrita Banerji. But some are transformative: “It’s interesting that a foreign drink brought in by a foreign colonial power became such an important thing. We don’t think of tea as a foreign drink anymore,” she tells Aravinda Anantharaman during this International Tea Day interview.

    Read more…

    Chitrita Banerji on the transformative

    Tea News you Need to Know

    By Dan Bolton

    Villagers have celebrated tea at local festivals that date to millennia. In the past hundred years, regional and national tea celebrations gained momentum — driven primarily by corporate marketers.

    A decade ago, the idea of a global day of recognition with a different message took hold. Joydeep Phukan, who directs the Tocklai Tea Research Institute in Assam, was tasked by the FAO’s Intergovernmental Group on Tea to convince the United Nations General Assembly to focus on producers, creating awareness and appreciation for the small growers responsible for most of the world’s tea. That took five years.

    Then the real work began. In 2019 when he learned of the General Assembly vote in favor of International Tea Day, Phukan challenged the industry: “Now that we have a dedicated day for tea, we need to do interesting things around the day to re-position tea as the most preferred beverage in the world.”

    Today you see that commitment passionately on display. There are virtual festivals, seminars, and academic presentations, an all-day SofaSummit to hear the voices of origin and the YouTube series “Around the World in 80 Teas” a marvelous virtual visit to the tea lands narrated by Will Battle and Dr. Sharon Hall, who directs the UK Tea & Infusions Association. The UN organized a presentation on sustainability and panel discussion. In Argentina, the Misiones tea growers are presenting a Spanish-language tea conference. In Sri Lanka the focus is marketing. In China the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs is hosting the Hangzhou International Tea Industry Expo, the largest face-to-face tea expo in China since the pandemic.  If you love tea please promote and participate in these activities, either live or over the weekend since most are recorded.

    Today is a glorious day, let’s all share in the tea industry’s ten-year overnight success.

    Biz InsightTea Biz presents Behind the Headlines, a 15-minute YouTube presentation by Dan Bolton describing trends that shape today’s news. Available in English and Spanish.

    Assam Forbids Tea Workers to Isolate at Home

    The situation has worsened in Assam to the point that workers who test COVID positive, many of whom are mothers and grandmothers, must quarantine outside their home until they recover. The practice is controversial but necessitated by the fact entire families have perished on the return of infected workers.

    Assam Health Minister Keshab Mahanta announced that

    “In the tea gardens, we have taken a tough stance on isolation of the positive patients. No one will be allowed to avail home isolation in the tea gardens.”

    Workers that do not require hospitalization must remain in COVID Care Centers where they are provided food and medicine. The vaccination rate remains low in part because many are unable to navigate the Co-WIN online registration system. Registration is mandatory for all those 18 years of age and older.

    During the past year Assam counted fewer than 1000 deaths but there were more than 500 cases in Dibrugarh this week. There were more than 6000 cases reported May 19 and the seven day average is more than 5000. Deaths are approaching 2,500.

    India recorded the highest COVID one day fatalities of any country this week. There are now 26 million active cases with almost 300,000 deaths officially recorded, a tally that is likely an undercount.

    Biz Insight – There were 1,851 tea workers who tested positive on 229 tea gardens of Assam last week. There are now 214 COVID Care Centres in operating with more opening this week. There are 850 registered gardens in the state, any that are found to have 20 or more workers test positive are declared a containment zone.

    Nepal First Flush Delayed

    Tea growers in Nepal faced a formidable combination of wet weather, expensive fertilizer, high transport costs, a shortage of labor, infestations of leaf curl and black tip that led to declines of as much as 40% last year compared to 2019.

    In 2021 drought is the big concern.

    Harvest totals or the first flush are half that of 2020. New leaves did not sprout on schedule due to drought conditions that lasted from December until February. The Kathmandu Post writes that unlike last year, the price of CTC (cut, tear, curl) teas are 200 Nepal Rupees per kilo, well below highs of 360 Nepal rupees last year.

    Nepal is also seeing a replay of last year’s Covid-19 crisis. Nepal reported 9,198 new confirmed cases on Monday around 3000% increase from last month. The positivity rate is averaging 45% with 174 deaths per day in a country of around 30 million population.

    Biz Insight – Nepal Tea founder Nishchal Banskota, who manages the family’s Nepal tea garden remotely from New York, writes that “along with the health crisis, the small farmers in the agricultural sector face even longer term impact due to their crops getting wasted due to the lockdowns and lack of market access. The farmers that were just hoping to recoup the losses from last year’s crisis are yet again faced with challenges to produce and sell their crops. The tea farmers find themselves in the same situation where they might not be able to harvest their most productive second flush due to the rise in the cases.” 

    Learn more on the Tea Biz Blog.

    Kagoshima May Soon Outproduce Shizuoka

    Shizuoka, Japan’s picturesque and most productive tea prefecture since 1959, may soon have to relinquish that title to Kagoshima, according to data released by Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Acreage under tea and green leaf output has slowly declined since the 1980s in Shizuoka which produced 25,200 metric tons of unprocessed tea leaves in 2019. The total is 34% of Japan’s tea production. The 2019 crop was valued at ¥ 25.1 billion yen (about $230 million US dollars). Kagoshima growers, who harvested only 2,700 metric tons in 1959, by 2019 were recording ¥ 25.2 billion in sales. The prefecture harvested nearly the same amount of tea on 7,970 hectares, compared to Shizuoka’s 13,700 hectares. The reason is that Kagoshima invested heavily in mechanized harvesting equipment now used on 97.5% of the prefecture’s farms. Due to steeper slopes and smaller plots, only 65.8% of Shizuoka’s tea is mechanically harvested.

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    Avoid the chaos of social media and start a conversation that matters. Subtext’s message-based platform lets you privately ask meaningful questions of the tea experts, academics and Tea Biz journalists reporting from the tea lands. You see their responses via SMS texts which are sent direct to your phone. Visit our website and subscribe to Subtext to instantly connect with the most connected people in tea.

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  • Tea Day Celebrations

    United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)

    The FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) programme has designated almost 60 sites as dynamic spaces where culture, biodiversity and sustainable agricultural techniques coexist, proving to be vital to achieve food security and generate livelihoods.

    China, Korea and Japan have four tea cultivation sites designated as Globally Important  Agricultural Heritage Systems by FAO. These sites that represent evolving systems of human communities in an intricate relationship with their territory, cultural and agricultural landscape.

    2021 Program

    Re-emphasizing the call from the Intergovernmental Group on Tea to direct greater efforts towards expanding demand, particularly in tea-producing countries, where per capita consumption is relatively low, and supporting efforts to address the declining consumption in traditional importing countries, the General Assembly decided to designate 21 May as International Tea Day.

    Learn more…

    2021 Program

    Virtual event on tea sustainability via Zoom on Friday, May 21 from 12:30-13:30 pm CEST EU followed by a panel discussion from 14:00-15:15 pm

    Webinar Registration Link

    https://fao.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EEZOOi64R6SAJAE565BFGQ

    Join the conversation | #InternationalTeaDay #TeaDay

    2020 Program

    The first observance of the International Tea Day was celebrated in a virtual event that will brought together the world’s top tea exporting and importing countries as well as major producing countries where tea cultivation is an important source of revenues. Watch here the recording of the celebration.

    • Harnessing benefits for all from field to cup — 21 May 2020 at 14:00 hours (Rome time). Watch the webcast. The first International Tea Day was celebrated virtually and was opened by FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu.  
    • Tea for Sustainable Development — 21 May 2020 at 10:00 hours (ETD). Watch the webcast. An interactive dialogue with Permanent Representatives from major tea-consuming and producing countries, co-organised by FAO and the Mission of China.

    Related: Tea Outlook to 2027

    SofaSummit 2021
    Join the SofaSummit on International Tea Day

    SofaSummit

    On May 21st, viewers around the world will tune in to 11 hours of talks with tea professionals from the tea lands. The free event, which is streamed on YouTube, is the creation of Shabnam Weber, president of the Tea and Herbal Association of Canada. Click to register.

    Learn more…

    SofaSummit organizer Shabnam Weber, Tea and Herbal Association of Canada
    SofaSummit Schedule

    UK Tea and Infusions Association

    The UK Tea and Infusions Association is marking International Tea Day – with a series of podcasts called “Around the world in 80 teas – the first few stops” in which Dr. Sharon Hall, Chief Executive of the UK Tea and Infusions Association, and her co-host, Will Battle, author of the World Tea Encyclopaedia, discuss some very different teas from around the world that are all produced from Camellia Sinensis tea bushes.

    “Our aim is to celebrate the wonderful beverages that can be made from the Camellia Sinensis plant. We will be publishing the podcasts in the run up to International Tea Day, on 21st May, said Hall. 

    “One of the great joys of tea is being able access a wealth of variety from around the world at very accessible prices. It has been great to celebrate this diversity by shining the spotlight on a few favourites” writes Battle.

    Learn more…

    Dr. Sharon Hall, CEO UK Tea & Infusions Association on Talking Tea

    Teas Featured in Virtual Tours

    • China- Long Jing – the Imperial tea
    • India -First Flush Darjeeling – the Himalayan tea
    • Kenya – Small holder tea – the Volcanic tea
    • Malawi – black tea – the Red tea
    • Russia – Caravan – the Smoky tea
    • Sri Lanka – High grown – the Extreme tea
    • Japan – Gyokuro & Matcha – the Shaded teas
    • China – Oolong- Tieguanyin and Big Red Robe– the Floral teas
    • India – Assam second flush – the Strong tea
    • UK – English Breakfast Tea – the Wake-up tea

    Ceylon Artisanal Tea Association

    The Sri Lanka Tea Board and the Colombo Tea Traders Association are showcasing that country’s artisanal tea makers during an International Tea Day webinar at 5:30 pm in Colombo (8 am EST US | 2 pm CEST EU | 8 pm Japan).

    Participants include

    • Anil Cooke, chairman of the Ceylon Tea Roadmap 2030.
    • Imran Akbarally, director Akbar Brothers Ltd.
    • Senaka Alawettegama, CEO Talawakelle Tea Estates
    • Udena Wickremesooriya, CEO Kaley Tea
    • Special Guest: Mike Harney, Harney & Sons

    Attendance is free. Registration not required. To attend simply click this Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89535798612

    International Tea Day Argentina
    Tea Day Celebration Argentina

    Argentina’s Jornada Dia Internacional del Té

    BUENOS AIRES

    The State of Misiones, in cooperation with the government of Argentina and local tea firms, will host a virtual tea conference on Friday, May 21 from 8:30 am until 2 pm (UTC-03:00). The meeting is hosted here (webex). Attendance is free.

    The half-day working conference is divided into two blocks, the first addresses tea in the domestic market with sessions on sustainable production, technology and local markets. The second block is a discussion of tea exports and trends in international markets.

    Speakers include Octavio Ingaramo, director of INTA (National Institute of Agricultural Technology); Carolina Okulovich, owner of The Tea Route, a tea retailer and producer. Okulovich is the daughter of the largest tea producer in Argentina and president of the Center for Tea Makers.

    Patricia Parra worked for the national Agricultural Ministry specializing in tea production. Luciana Imbrogno is Secretary to the Agricultural Minister. Helmuth Kunmritz is an engineer and independent tea producer. Lic. Emiliano Lysiak works at INTA Misiones, the state institute conducting tea research in Misiones. Edson Teramoto is an agricultural certification coordinator.

    Horacio Bustos is founder of Gyokuro Circulo Argentino del Té and John Smagula, Assistant Dean, Graduate & International Programs; Associate Professor, China Rule-of-Law Program at Temple University. Dan Bolton is publisher of Tea Journey Magazine and host of the weekly Tea Biz podcast.

    Program

    • 8.45 hs. | Articulacion Institucional
    • 9.30 hs. | Nuevos Mercados y Exportaciones
    • 10.10 hs. | Produccion Sostenible del Te
    • 11.20 hs. | Tendencias
    • 12.30 hs. | Conclusiones y cierre

    Join by video: http://bit.ly/jornadavirtualte
    [email protected] or dial 173.243.2.68 and enter meeting number 173 789 6796 (attendance is free)

    Program

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