Henrietta Lovell seeks to redefine good tea as a beverage that tastes amazing. Tea must also benefit the people who craft it and those who drink it, she says. Her firm buys direct from farmers globally, advocating farmer support and development over costly certifications and rejects teas grown with pesticides and herbicides or blended with additives and flavoring.
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The Value in High Quality Tea
Having read Henrietta Lovell’s fabulously engaging book “Infused, Adventures in Tea” earlier this year with TeaBookClub, I jumped at the chance to chat to Henrietta the tea person, founder of Rare Tea Company, mistress of the artful blend and champion of tea farmers. Join me as the Rare Tea Lady spills the tea.
Kyle Whittington: I’m fascinated about the moment someone “gets” tea. What’s been your experience of this?
Henrietta Lovell: It’s very interesting. If they’ve already got a preconception of what tea is, it is harder. So if I’ve got a young person, or they don’t have a very firm, fixed preconception. They might be a little bit more fluid, bit more open to experiencing new things. So then it’s like, “Oh, I’d love to try.” And then “Oh, this is amazing, this is delicious.” But when someone’s got a very strong opinion beforehand, then it’s a really wonderful revelation. Because you know that you’re not just making someone fall in love, you’re making them change an established thought pattern and it’s super exciting. But I don’t really do it, the tea does it. I’ve got a very privileged position where people will trust me enough now to try things and it’s just absolutely wonderful.
It’s one of the most life a?rming experiences. Really, the most is when they’re very resolutely not going to like it. They think they know what they like. And then, they have a taste of something that just starts to excite them. And it’s like “Oh, okay” but their face is still completely closed, they’re just there because they need to be or they’ve been dragged in. And then the face softens, the body language softens, and a sort of joy starts to creep into the face.
Because pleasure is a joy. Let’s not forget. It’s not just amazing flavors. It’s really a sense of euphoria that overcomes you when you discover something that is so beautiful, and so joyous.
Kyle: So is there one tea that really captures people?
Henrietta: I mean that obviously we will have very di?erent tastes and flavor profiles that we enjoy most. But interestingly, it’s often either an English breakfast or jasmine tea because we know those teas very well. And experience is so extraordinarily wonderful because you think you know something, and then it’s opened out to you.
Jasmine silver tip because it’s so clean and bright and fresh and it’s scented with jasmine flower. There’s no flavoring in there. This is just the flowers that have given up their scent, and it’s been absorbed into the tea. That is such an extraordinary experience. People are like “Oh, ooh!” And it’s so extraordinary. They’re sort of, “I know it but I don’t know it.” And they feel quite discombobulated at first, and then very joyous.
And then the other thing is to do is an English breakfast with an industrial teabag, and then an English breakfast made with beautiful teas crafted to be something better than the sum of its parts. And that’s really amazing. You try them side by side, and then there is this revelation because you’ve probably drunk that industrial teabag tea every day of your life, maybe six times a day. And then you have something that is remarkably better. You’re like shit, what have I been missing out on my whole life. And that can be a little bit hurtful. You can’t argue with your taste buds. So when your taste buds say, “Oh my God this is better.” you have to just let go of the past and go Okay, the world is opened out. Whatever their taste background, whatever their profession, whether they’re a taxi driver or a famous chef, or a sommelier, everybody can taste the di?erence. So it’s much more accessible. It’s just having that first sip.
Kyle: You’re known for creating some fabulous blends. But sometimes, blending is seen as the poor relation to a “pure” tea. How do you see blends and the art of blending?
Henrietta: I think it’s the intention of the blend that’s absolutely important. Are you trying to create something that’s better than the sum of its parts? Or are you trying to disguise or make bland and easily indistinguishable? But it can be something really extraordinary. And with such a huge cornucopia of flavors within black teas, but then with blending, it becomes exponential. Absolutely exponential, what you can achieve. I’m still shocked. I’m still surprised now.
Because it’s never the sum of its parts.
The history of scientific revolutions is often led by mistake and that’s often been the case for me.
My favorite thing that I’m drinking at the moment is a blend of almond blossoms from Tarragona with Croatian Camomile. But I never thought I would do that, I did it totally by mistake. I have to admit that to you. I charge lots and lots of money for making blends for people and then sometimes I just do one very good one by total mistake.
Kyle: I’m interested, what’s something that bugs you in the tea world?
Henrietta: But I wanted to say that there’s a lot of snobbery around tea and we should be more inclusive. If we’re going to make a real revolution in the tea world and get people to understand that there is this cornucopia of deliciousness and joy and flavour. Which will in turn, nourish and support the tea community throughout the world. We got to stop putting our noses in air and being snobby and shutting everyone out who doesn’t know, you know, the names of tea estates in Taiwan. It’s really not that interesting, what the code of that that particular varietal is. Because there’s so much more to do with flavor.
Kyle: Talking of snobbery, how do you deal with the naming of a tea? What’s your approach?
Henrietta: Two of the farmers that I admire most (one is Jun Chiyabari in Nepal) they refuse to use any of the old colonial terms. So they won’t do a TGFOP or whatever and they’re now even not calling things green or black tea. Because why is it that it has to be a green or a black tea? One of the teas we have is called Himalayan Spring and it’s actually technically, if you’re going to be super technical, a black tea though it tastes like green tea. And so if we called it black tea it would disappoint everybody. So why do we need to? The flavor profile is softer, richer, much greener than a lot of green teas. If you’re comparing it with a very deep Sencha, you’d be like, well, this is not. How can we call these two things green tea? It’s like trying to compare a whiskey with a rum almost.
If you really love tea, if it’s a real love, not an intellectual challenge, then it doesn’t really matter what it’s called. And if you need to know more about it, you should be able to delve in. I ask questions of my farmers all the time passed on from my customers because that connection is jolly important. If you really need to know varietal number of the tea then we’ll find that out and get it to you. But I don’t think that should be the thing that leads because it’s really o? putting.
People often question me on our packaging, it’s often very simple on the front. It might say just green tea or oolong tea and then on the back it says more stu?. And that’s because I began in 2004 and no one had ever heard of oolong tea, so I didn’t call it Tie Guan Yin, or Iron Goddess of Mercy. So I’ve really tried and it’s been super interesting how farmers have adopted that same thing.
My favorite new terroir, and one that I admired tremendously is in New Zealand in Waikato. They’re producing tea and again they’re not using traditional names. They’re making oolong teas and they’re not calling them oolong they’re calling them, you know, dark or light or whatever. Just simple words that people will be able to understand from about the flavor.
Kyle: You work directly with farms, what is it about working directly that is so important for you?
Henreitta: Working with farms. Working with people to understand, number one, there’s a value in high quality tea, but working with farms. That we don’t just ostracise people or communities that have been reliant on industrial tea. We don’t just say “Oh, we can’t work with them.”
Often people speak about farms that produce speciality tea and non speciality tea. If the person who’s picking the tea is paid the same for both. Well then that’s not fair really, because then the value of that speciality tea is not getting to the picker. And this is not okay. We shouldn’t really work with commercial farms that are producing non speciality tea.
There is not a problem with supply in the world of speciality tea. There is a problem with demand. That is the problem, right?
So it’s our job to try and spread the demand and to educate people and to show people that there’s a reason and a value for buying more expensive tea.
But if a farmer is trying to come out of a world where they’ve been reliant on selling commodity tea, cheaper tea because that’s where the market was, we can’t punish them when they’re trying to then create speciality tea. And this makes me so mad. And when you talk about wages and you say, “Well, I shouldn’t work with a farm where the wages are low.” How are they going to improve the wages if we don’t buy more speciality tea? We need to work with these farmers because we have to understand that we need to have relationships. How do you get to that? Like working in a farm in Malawi; wages are low, life expectancy is low, standard of living is low. How do we make a fucking difference there? How do we do it differently? And it’s not by only working with a tiny small holder or tiny farm that just makes speciality tea. That’s part of the solution. But it’s not the only solution.
Rare Tea Co.
Henrietta Lovell is perhaps best known as the Rare Tea Lady, after her company “Rare Tea Co.” rareteacompany.com. Sourcing directly from farmers since the very beginning, Henrietta has traveled the world, searching for rare and precious harvests of teas and tisanes. Her quest has taken her on many adventures, from the far flung and bizarre to those closer to home. She has worked with some of the most prestigious restaurants and hotels around the world, pairing teas and creating bespoke blends. Henrietta founded Rare Charity, which works to bring educational opportunity to young people in tea growing areas.
“The people working in tea estates represent some of the most marginalized communities in many of the world’s poorest countries,” writes Lovell. “Our aim is to give ambitious young people the agency to uplift themselves, their households and their community. Education enables these young people to return to their community as qualified professionals, to implement long-term social change,” she said.
Can a world that has already eroded a third of the planet’s soils feed a population of 10 billion without intensive agricultural practices that rely on heavy inputs of fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides that sustain monoculture farming?
To answer this question, the Tea Biz Podcast and Blog is undertaking a series of interviews with thought-leaders in tea from organizations such as the Rainforest Alliance, growers in Sri Lanka, where a nationwide ban on the import and manufacture of plant chemicals was instituted in May; and with multinationals like Unilever, a company with extensive tea holdings that recently unveiled its basic principals of regenerative agriculture.
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Unilever’s Principles of Regenerative Agriculture
By Dan Bolton
In a review of the World Resources Institute’s December report on the looming “food gap” The Guardian writes that “compared with 2010, an extra 7,400 trillion calories will be needed each year by 2050. If food production increases along current lines, that would require a landmass twice the area of India.”
As temperatures rise and rainfall becomes more erratic, attention has shifted to climate change on a grand scale and mitigation at the farm level. Tea is generally grown on hillsides at altitudes less favorable to food crops but the looming scarcity of land for food crops and the depletion of soil on existing farms present long-term challenges for the tea industry.
Unilever acknowledges there is no accepted definition of regenerative agriculture, but the phrase is widely used to refer to practices that include minimum or no tillage, a reduction in the use of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, extensive crop rotation and well-managed grazing for animals instead of industrial feedlots.
Regenerative agriculture is focused on the soil and the enhancement of soil organic matter – SOM is a mix of plant and animal debris, soil microbes in an enriched environment of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. SOM improves soil structure, reduces erosion, and retains water.
Extensive planting of cover crops also draws carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere where it is retained in the soil.
Unilever’s Regenerative Agriculture Principles (RAP) are focused on regenerating soils, protecting water quality, increasing biodiversity, developing climate solutions; and improving farmer livelihoods.
The intent is to optimize the use of renewable resources while minimizing the use of non-renewable resources; while keeping resource inputs as low as possible.
The goal of protecting topsoil from erosion and restoring existing soil finds widespread support, but some consider regenerative agriculture to be “over-hyped.”
As NBC News reported in 2019, “one much-cited estimate of potential soil sequestration published to date suggests that if regenerative practices were used on all of the world’s croplands and pastures forever — a huge assumption — the soil may be able to sequester up to 322 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.” That’s a long way from the one teraton that is sometimes claimed to be possible.
Sharon Kelly on Desmog.com writes that “A lot of studies that claim regenerative agriculture can have a huge impact “do not address scientific and practical challenges” involved in employing those practices, the World Resources Institute argues.
She goes on to point out that “Big agrichem companies have been marketing a form of regenerative agriculture that could keep farms reliant on pesticides and other chemicals. For example, farmers may use chemicals to kill off crops at the end of a season rather than using tillage. While that may keep the soil in place, the chemicals used can damage the integrity of the soil in other ways. So while it could be good for carbon emissions, it could perpetuate other environmental problems.”
Kelly writes that “While regenerative agriculture may be in-vogue, it’s not well defined. The term “regenerative” — unlike terms such as “organic” — isn’t defined by regulators and “regenerative agriculture” farmers are not required to show that they’ve followed any specific standards. It’s part of a wider suite of strategies that fall under the umbrella of “climate smart agriculture”, a similarly ill-defined term, which critics say can be used by companies to greenwash their images while avoiding regulation.
Giulia Stellari, sustainable sourcing director at Unilever told FoodNavigator that the stated principles are a starting point. It’s important the industry agree on a definition. “Without consensus, it’s difficult to have alignment amongst organization and therefore difficult to track progress.”
Beyond the Farm
Unilever also makes it clear that “The farms in our supply chain are a key focus for our nature regeneration work. But to do all we can to protect and regenerate nature, we must look beyond the farm and consider the wider impact of agricultural and industrial practices. Where we see an opportunity, we will work with suppliers and farmers to apply regenerative principles to restore natural ecosystems too,” writes Unilever.
“Here the opportunity is in working with local governments, technical organizations, NGOs, suppliers and peer companies to educate farmers and build capability and capacity for the protection of natural ecosystems.
“Regenerating nature requires a whole systems approach, and we are continuing to look closely at our role in the system, and the different places we can play our part.”
Next in the series is a conversation with the Rainforest Alliance on how regenerative agriculture differs from sustainable farming.
Unilever’s Investment in Sustainable Tea Estates
Kenya offers a model for developing countries where smallholders generate most of the tea consumed. In 2006, Unilever pioneered Farmer Field School programs with the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA). Initially supported by the UK Government, and IDH (the Sustainable Trade Initiative) provided funding from 2008. This helped scale it into a program that eventually trained nearly 100,000 farmers – around half women – on good agricultural practices to increase yields and quality.
While the main aim was for farmers to meet Rainforest Alliance certification standards and improve incomes, they also learned how to grow other crops to diversify and protect themselves from tea price fluctuations, as well as good hygiene and nutrition practices.
Advances in sustainable practices are most evident at the Kericho Tea Estate which covers 22,500 acres (9,000 ha) and employs 5,500 full-time workers along with thousands more temporary workers during the harvest season. Kericho also buys significant quantities of raw leaf from local smallholders.
“We have worked hard over many years to improve pay and conditions and we now pay workers well above the industry average – about two and a half times the statutory minimum agricultural income in Kenya as well as health care, education and housing benefits,” writes Unilever. Benefits include transport allowances, paternity and maternity leave, health care, nursery and clean drinking water for the 40,000 people living in company villages.
Pickled tea leaves may sound a bit out of the ordinary but not for Southeast Asian chefs. Burma, now known as Myanmar, is an ancient crossroads influenced by the cuisine of bordering Bangladesh, China, Thailand, and Laos. It is here that laphet has become a national dish that is now finding its way to US and European consumers as branded packaged goods.
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Cultured Tea Leaves Flavor Many Dishes
By Aravinda Anantharaman
Tea’s popularity is as a beverage, and a versatile one at that. A single plant produces leaves that are processed, blended, flavored, aged, rolled, compressed, bagged, powdered into a product that finds its audience. But tea’s versatility is not limited to the choice it offers as a drink alone. As a green leaf, it’s also an herb but surprisingly this side of tea has yet been tapped to its fullest potential. Except perhaps in Myanmar (formerly Burma) bordering India, Bangladesh, China, Thailand, and Laos. Not surprisingly, tea is also cultivated here, but its most famous rendition is as laphet or fermented tea leaf, used in a salad called the laphet thoke or mixed with rice. The uses of the fermented tea leaves are not limited to salad or a dish. It’s immensely popular in Burmese cuisine – probably the unofficial national dish. It’s said that only the finest leaves of any harvest are used to make lahpet.
Burmese cuisine enjoys fantastic influences, surrounded by countries with culinary wealth. Its popularity may not have reached the levels of say, it’s neighboring Thailand’s cuisine but there’s plenty of offer. Overseas Burmese are now seeing that there is an interest in the lesser known, unexplored cultures of the world, offering an opportunity to promote their own. There are a handful of brands, including Burma Love Foods, a 5-year-old brand from San Francisco whose product range is built on laphet. Besides variations of the dressing, they offer do-it-yourself salad kits which should hold appeal. Myanmar Tea Leaf’s Paline is a homegrown brand producing laphet, said to be the first to brand the product.
“Tea you can eat” is an attractive opportunity for promoters of Burmese cuisine, to take something so familiar as tea but offer it in newer ways, and equally for tea businesses that are looking for deeper cultural connections with tea.
Tea Master Sun seems to comprehend that I’m being transformed, yet his words are as colorless as can be. “So, Pu’er. Tell us what you know about it.”
The minute he asks this question, I understand two things…
That’s a quote from The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See (page 175-176)
Kyle Whittington reviews The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa SeeThe Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See
A Brilliantly Layered Book
Despite being a work of fiction, one immediately feels that the tea content is thorough and factually based, adding interesting and personable facts to a tea reader’s knowledge banks.
I found myself repeatedly drawn in and captivated by the story whilst doing my initial skim read, checking there was sufficient tea content for TeaBookClub members. There was. Tea content aplenty. Whilst reading, and by the time I’d finished it I found myself with a renewed interest in the world of Pu’er tea, a pond I’d previously only dipped my toe into. Fascinating and well researched tea content is liberally scattered throughout the book, revealing the mysterious world of Pu’er tea. From ancient secret groves and lost production through its re-discovery to rapid growth, boom and bust over the last three decades. Despite being a work of fiction, one immediately feels that the tea content is thorough and factually based, adding interesting and personable factoids to the tea readers knowledge banks. And ultimately, for many, inspiring a new or renewed interest in the world of Pu’er.
Undoubtedly a literary work worthy of the recommendations that brought it to my reading chair, it is interesting how different lenses can change the readers experience. Reading it with a tea mind gives, I feel, a rather different experience to that of a reader coming to it purely as a novel. Something which became clear when discussing it with TeaBookClub members.
For the tea reader, this is a book of two halves. Whilst the first half cleverly sets up Li-yan’s world of Akha tradition and starts her on her journey. It can at times feel like wading through a documentary on the Akha, despite the captivating writing. It’s not until Li-yan makes it to Kunming that the pace suddenly picks up and we’re zipping through the exciting tea world as the pu’er trend picks up pace alongside. I personally wanted to spend more time with Tea Master Sun and in Li-yan’s tea shop in the tea market at this point. But on we zipped to California and the eventual riveting ending, which left me desperately wanting to know what happened next.
There are so many brilliant layers to this book, and it could be looked at through so many different lenses. The rapid transition of the Akha way of life into the modern world was fascinating and could spark its own lengthy discussion. From another view, the mother daughter story, adoption, or Chinese immigrants in the USA could all be delved into and discussed. But for the tea reader this is a wonderful story, packed with great tea content that will either develop or ignite an interest in, and desire to explore the world of Pu’er further.
Here’s what some TeaBookClub members thought:
“I haven’t gotten into Pu’er that much, but the book has definitely inspired me to now.” – Alison, UK
“I thought the ending was a tear-jerker, I was definitely glued to those last ten pages“- Chris, USA
“I found it touching to read” – Aimée, Canada
“I thought it was too encyclopedic initially [the first time reading it], I found the beginning too much explanation about the Akha people but then because TeaBookClub chose it to read I picked it up and I’m happy I really read it though.” – Aimée, Canada
“I found it a little bit cliche when she finds the love of her life and he’s like her knight in shining armor and she’s a little bit of the princess, a Cinderella kind of thing. But then what I really liked about it was the little nuggets about tea culture in China. How the women when they’re picking the leaves talk about life. The culture in the villages, tea is their life, their culture, they have this appreciation of the leaf. She describes that really well; it’s not just about picking and processing. But I thought bits of the story line were a bit Disney, she’s shopping on Rodeo drive, its like Pretty Woman at one point! I liked those little bits about the life, about the culture of tea.” – Alison, UK
“When it talked about selling the fake tea, that was very relatable in the tea industry. And their reaction to it, how could you be upset with all the money they’re making, just make a little bit more. It showed how different the view was on the ground versus our 30,000 feet distance view.” – Chris, USA
“There was so much build up around the tribe and then it jumped very quickly though the story.” – Chris, USA
“The first part really explains the character and how she feels different from the Han majority and from her own tribe.” – Aimée, Canada
“It’s easier to digest the tea knowledge in that [novel] format sometimes, it drops bits of information in and it’s easier to take the information in.” – Alison, France
“I liked how she brings up the challenges of being an adopted Chinese girl in America. Not feeling Chinese, not feeling American…. I thought she captured the experience of wanting to find her [Hayley] birth parents and the excitement she got around seeing how other people found it. It’s a one in a million chance, its never going to happen but at least I’ll try, it makes sense to go and do that. I thought that was captured really well.” – Chris, USA
“I really loved the part with all the girls talking with the psychologist. That was really clever.” – Aimée, Canada
Although based in the UK, The Tea Book Club is an international group of tea lovers and readers who meet up virtually each month to discuss tea books. If you’d like to join us for the next read, visit teabookclub.org or @joinTeaBookClub on Instagram.
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Goodreads: Lisa See is a Chinese-American author. Her books include Snow Flower and the Secret Fan (2005), Dragon Bones, and On Gold Mountain. She was named the 2001 National Woman of the Year, by the Organization of Chinese American Women. She lives in Los Angeles.
The recent sale of two iconic Darjeeling gardens drew attention to the ongoing challenges facing growers in this fabled tea-growing region. Jungpana and Goomtee were acquired by the Santosh Kanoria group, which owns tea exporter, Balaji Agro International. The group also owns the Tindharia estate in Darjeeling. We spoke to Anshuman Kanoria, chairman of Balaji Agro and also chairman, Indian Tea Exporters Association, about this acquisition.
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Anshuman Kanoria discusses his company’s purchase of two iconic tea gardens in Darjeeling, India.Jungpana Tea Estate, Darjeeling, India
Assessing Darjeeling’s Jungpana and Goomtee Estates
Anshuman Kanoria is chairman, Balaji Agro International, and chairman of the Indian Tea Exporters Association. His company owns the estates Tindharia, Goomtee, and Jungpana in Darjeeling.
Aravinda Anantharaman:What is the mood in Darjeeling? We hear of many gardens going up for sale.
Anshuman Kanoria: The last three years have not been easy. Nature has conspired against us; we had the lockdown last year which affected quality. And this year, we had one of the worst droughts in Darjeeling that affected the first flush. The outlook for Darjeeling is bleak.
There was a time when people used to say that more tea is sold in the garb of Darjeeling than is produced. It was hoped that with the GI [2011 EU authentication and protection as a registered Geographical Indication*] the price for Darjeeling would improve, and there would be more real Darjeeling in the world. As it stands, it has become difficult to find buyers, even for 8 million kilos. Today, 8 million kilos are sold but not at a price even close to the cost of production.
People like to blame it on aging bushes but to the best of their ability, people have planted, replanted, and rejuvenated their bushes. The real problem lies in a combination of climate change, insufficient pluckers, and various disturbances which have been occurring in Darjeeling on a regular basis over the last five or six years.
Wages are a highly sensitive issue. [Jungpana was last sold in 2017, a sale that came on the heels of the Gorka agitation and 103-day tea worker’s strike.] I understand the need to pay much more for workers, but there needs to be a correlation between what a garden is earning and what it can pay for labor.
You have to understand the breakup of Darjeeling production. Approximately 20% of Darjeeling production is the first flush, and approximately 20% is the second flush. Approximately 60% is rain production. Now we can break that down to the grades; in the first and second flush it’s 60% whole leaf, in the rains, it is at a maximum of 55% whole leaf while 45% are broken leaf teas and fannings.
The average cost of production can vary from 10% lower to 30% higher, but let us say, the average cost of production of the garden is $10 (per kilo). So, 42-45% of your annual production, which is broken leaf, fanning, and dust, is selling for less than $4 a kilo; and you’re losing $6. In gardens with a higher cost of production, losses can be even more. Let’s say 60% is the whole leaf; of this, roughly 35% is produced in the rainy period and sold at an average price of less than $8 a kilo. That leaves you with 25% from which to make up that loss. This 25% is the whole leaf production from the first and second flush that is prized quality Darjeeling. We really need to be getting average prices close to $25 per kilo to make ends meet in Darjeeling, which is a very tall ask. Therein lies the mathematics of Darjeeling.
What is the reality? Every year we see a winter drought, which means the first flush will get affected. Every year, we see heavy nonseasonal rain from May onward which disturbs the second flush. So the two periods which are your quality periods where you need to do well, are getting adversely impacted due to climate change.
It is getting more and more difficult to get pluckers. As workers’ children become better educated, their aspirations are naturally increasing. And in the hills we can’t do mechanization, we can only do very limited shear plucking which is not good for quality. On top of that, there is so much pressure now on the industry, in terms of food safety and MRL [Maximum Residue Level] compliance. This is an additional challenge that Darjeeling is facing as well, now that everybody is heading towards greater requirements for compliance and certification.
Aravinda:What does the acquisition of Jungpana and Goomtee estates mean for your company? And for Darjeeling’s tea industry?
Anshuman: This is a decision where my brain kept telling me are you crazy. And my heart said, if not now, then when. Can I make it work? I can give it my best shot. Up till now, the people who used to own these gardens have been either plantation people or investors. Nobody has been in marketing. My forte has been marketing, my core company is Balaji Agro International which is an extremely well-known trading house and we’ve been around since the late 1960s. My father Santosh Kanoria was one of the pioneers in the field of export.
My focus is going to be quality. My number one concern is the back end. You can have a garden like Jungpana and call it the ‘Louis Vuitton’ of Darjeeling tea, but that claim is worthless unless and until the product is good. It should taste good. It should be aspirational. I can create a story around it, I can leverage the story of Jungpana but my first focus is restoring the quality and restoring the discipline of working in the plantation; of establishing much better plantation management. It’s shocking beyond my comprehension how these estates have been just left to flounder.
We have already started to get them back on the road to recovery, putting different practices into play and much better administrators. I think the workers also recognize that now they have somebody much more serious about the tea. I’m praying that I get the cooperation of people to try and restore it.
Am I a hundred percent sure I’ve done the right thing? Definitely not. Financially, it could be my greatest disaster, something that can really set me back in a massive way. I have no illusions.
I think Jungpana is a much bigger brand name but it is also a much more adversely affected garden. It’s a beautiful garden, it’s a beautiful brand but we are treading much more on a short-term basis. The challenges with Jungpana are immense. Frankly, we are giving it our best shot but I have to really consider if in the long-term I want to keep it.
Goomtee is a garden that we want under our umbrella. My first aim is to make it 100 percent organic. We will begin the [three-year] conversion this year. I believe organic is the way forward for Darjeeling. We have a lot of plans for Goomtee but Jungpana – we have kept our options open in terms of our long-term holding of Jungpana.
We ended up buying both the gardens because it was offered as a package deal and I did not have a way to buy only Goomtee.
Aravinda:What about your other garden, Tindharia? What do you make there?
Anshuman: In Tindharia, in the first flush we make a conventional black tea. It’s doing very well. Almost all of it has gone to Germany with a bit of it going to Japan and the US.
In the second flush, we make conventional (conventional in terms of quality) black tea from our China and clonal section. But around the second flush period, that is some part of May, most of June onward, we turn the garden into a green tea garden.
My father had mastered a very old art of making green tea, which does not use the conventional method. We bathe each freshly plucked green leaf to remove the bitterness from the leaf and all the dust that has settled on it. It is a much more extensive and worker-intensive method to produce it, but we produce it.
The tea is very well received and hence the demand has been more than what we can produce. The garden produces approximately 65-70% green tea and 30-35% conventional black tea. It is an organic garden. In Darjeeling, if you want to survive in the long term unless you are to be a high-yield, low-cost production estate, in which case you might survive without being organic, but everybody else should really be organic.
Aravinda:You also head the exporters’ association. What are your views on the export market? Is it still sustaining Darjeeling? How are the dependencies changing? How is Darjeeling holding out to the competition?
Anshuman: I think we have mishandled a lot of things. For example, when the GI* registry was approved, there was a belief that our importers were cheating (that belief didn’t come from me, but it came from a section of the trade, which was very misguided in my view). They reasoned if they could prevent passing off non-Darjeeling as Darjeeling teas, they would have a great price discovery and there would be a financial boom for Darjeeling. I think the premise that [40 million kilos] of tea grown elsewhere was being passed off as Darjeeling was exaggerated. Secondly, it was presented to buyers in a manner that, ‘Okay, now we are the policemen and we are going to catch you wherever you go.’
You can’t regulate your buyers with a stick like that.
The buyers had no benefit. They were told, ‘You are thieves, you are going to be regulated.’ And all these fancy logos that we managed to get… I mean what good is a logo if you don’t attach value to it? We have not pumped in any money behind our logo promotion.
And, really, who is responsible for having popularized Darjeeling tea? I would say it is the German importers, to whom we owe everything. It is not the growers, it is not the exporters, it is not the government, it is not the Tea Board of India. It is the Germans who have taken the tea and made it popular around the world. They may have kept larger cuts for themselves, but we still owe it to them. They are the ones who are gunning for us.
And instead of trying to take them along, we have really tried to be confrontational. I think that the GI registry, which could have done very good things for Darjeeling, started off on a very bad note and alienated a lot of people who were supporting Darjeeling.
The other big mistake was taking the auction online from a manual system. What used to happen was producers concentrated on producing tea while the marketing was being done by tea exporters. In a physical auction, the room used to be full, there used to be many people buying tea and they were all bitter competitors. So everyone used to make sure that nothing sold cheaply to anyone. How do you bring about price discovery? True price discovery comes from competition. The old auction system, the manual auction, used to create much more competition. Now we have almost every grower selling directly to a limited number of buyers. Where is the competition? The merchant exporters who used to be the backbone of the industry, have almost lost interest in Darjeeling. And each merchant exporter was catering to 20-30 buyers. If you had 20 people like that, you had competition coming from 300-400 sources.
The Germans are very keen to promote Nepal. They look at Nepal as something truly exotic. Production of hill-grown Nepal has gone up to something like 6 million kilos. They don’t have labor laws or food safety laws as we do. They don’t have a Plantation Labour Act like we do. They are not estates. They’re all small factories, which are buying tea from small growers. So their cost for production is in line with the market. So they can’t lose money. The small growers get what they can get. And the Germans are happy to promote it as something exotic.
Aravinda:Do you think the damage to Darjeeling’s reputation with buyers has reached the point of no return, or is there some hope to revive this relationship and see what comes of it?
Anshuman: If I thought there was no chance I wouldn’t have gotten into all this.
I know that costs will increase. And I can only keep my fingers crossed that the labor union, the government will understand the plight of the industry and not try to impose such figures on us which are “unsustainable.”
Every time I go abroad, participate in a trade show, or at a conference, the word I hear the most is “sustainable”. And we have the gurus of the import trade give us long-winded sermons about how we need to ensure soil sustainability, water sustainability. I have only one question: What about the financial sustainability of the estates? Every time we try to bring up prices, we are told there is a war among supermarkets and we have to keep prices low. Consumers want everything, but don’t want to pay for it. What do we do? Either we pay the labor nothing, which is not possible in today’s India, or we lose money to a point where we are not sustainable. Plantations are going to lose out to tourism or some other crop and tea will be secondary. There are maybe 5 or 6 or 7 owners today who have a real passion for Darjeeling and a real commitment for Darjeeling. It’s in our blood. This is why Darjeeling is still alive. Otherwise, even on a macroeconomic level, there is no future for Darjeeling.
Aravinda: What about innovation in the tea itself?
Anshuman: Well, take the example of Tindharia. If I had tried to run this as a pure black tea garden, the garden wouldn’t have survived. You have to basically see the leaf profile and the quality profile of your estate. And you have to think about what kind of a product mix you want to have based on what quality output you can get from your garden at any given time during the year.
We can do green tea and we have enough challenges with green tea because the whole leaf green tea has a market. But 40-45% of the smaller grade, which is the broken leaf and fannings, has a very limited market.
Aravinda: So, is there a need for something like the Muscatel that sets Darjeeling apart from everybody?
Anshuman: All the new planting that has been done in Darjeeling uses clonal bushes. You hear fancy names like AV2, P123, etc, which are great denominators of quality in Darjeeling. But these are bushes with a very specific flavor profile. And the gardens in Nepal have very similar bushes and young bushes at that. And the thing about these bushes is, whether you are located at 2,000 feet altitude or 6,000 feet; or whether you are located on this side of the hill or the other side of the hill, your flavor character is going to be very similar. You might have a higher flavor or a lower less intense flavor but it’s going to be the same character. You’re not going to get a muscatel flavor from a clonal bush. The muscatel flavor comes from a China bush. And when you uproot your China bushes to plant clonal bushes, you are actually sacrificing the USP [unique sales proposition] of Darjeeling which is that Muscatel which you find in this bush. So we have to really strike that balance with keeping our China character which is something that Nepal can never compete with. That is what stands Darjeeling apart. I can understand replacing a lot of the Assam, the Assam hybrid bushes, with the clonal bushes. But I’m not really in support of replacing any good China sections with anything clonal.
Aravinda:What about the domestic market? There’s more talk about the domestic market these days than there ever has been. Do you think it’s not been explored enough and two, do you think the time has come, or is it just a desperate attempt to find a significant market?
Anshuman: So I have a cynical view. Nowadays I’m seeing a lot of people, producers are investing in their e-commerce operations and their website management. There are a lot of other companies, smaller startups, which are trying to be a B2C e-commerce operation. I don’t think most of them are asking themselves the question, ‘What sets me apart?’ They just think this is a good idea, let’s do it, let’s try to make a little bit of money, we don’t have an idea of what else to do.
Another category, which has done this in a bigger way, managed to get a hell of a lot of investor funding and they have their own USP. I quite admire what Vahdam Tea has done, for example, and the way they have positioned themselves in the US. But there are a lot of small startups who are really coming in the hope that they will get some footfalls, get acquired by somebody else, or let’s get some investor funding and make some money. I don’t know how much they really think they can really increase demand. And they’re starting off from a very low base of how much good tea they are selling on an e-commerce platform in India.
If you give me any growth number in terms of percentage, it means nothing; if you’re starting off with 5 metric tons of tea and you say we went to 500 metric tons, that’s something.
I think the Indian market has potential, there is no doubt about it. I think the pandemic has given an opportunity as well. Tea is associated with wellness. We all know the health benefits of tea. And we need to somehow combine the platform of health, great taste, and a lifestyle and build that story around tea. That’s a lot of hard work. I’m not sure how many people are really going to attempt to do that. I sincerely hope that given the employment numbers of tea, the fact that Darjeeling is so strategically located, that it is a flag bearer of quality for Indian tea, it’s a GI product for India, I truly hope that the government of India, will come and lend a hand because Darjeeling at the moment is struggling, after the kind of pitfalls it has faced, particularly during the strike of 2017 and the lockdown came right after, and then in 2021, the drought came. I don’t believe in government subsidies but right now, looking at the kind of situation we are facing, I truly hope the government will come up with some kind of scheme. It’s not about handouts, it’s about promotion.
What can save Darjeeling? Some help from the government for promotion, some kind of a development package as a one-off thing just to help Darjeeling stand up again from the three blows it has received in the last few years, taking that into account. We need to completely focus again on quality.
It’s also very clear that a tea garden will find it difficult to survive only as a tea garden. The government now allows you to use a part of your land for other activities, whether it is tea tourism or whatever. I think we have to all utilize our land and look at land parcels and also try to get revenue.
Aravinda: What do you make of the recent Tea Board mandate on the 50% production to be routed via auctions?
Anshuman: One of the problems with Indian tea, in general, is you have so many different marketing platforms. You have an auction that is over-regulated, micromanaged by the Tea Board. You have completely unregulated private sales where a producer can choose to give a 3-month credit to a buyer. You have a producer-exporter doing direct exports, you have a producer doing direct packaging for the domestic market. So in a multi-faceted marketing environment, what is the future of an over-regulated auction system by the Tea Board? We need the auction, for sure. But not with the current set of regulations and rules. This is something that the government has to take note of and completely deregulate and let the stakeholders run it.
The Tea Board has many more important things to do, such as concentrating on tea promotion.
Aravinda: Your acquisition of the gardens has brought some optimism to Darjeeling. Why is that?
Anshuman: Optimism came from the fact that there has been a lot of speculation as to what we have paid for the gardens. I refuse to go on record and confirm but it’s very clear that we have paid a hefty price. So a lot of the optimism came from other people who want to sell their garden and think now there will be a resurgence in the valuation of Darjeeling gardens. A conservative guy like me entering Darjeeling despite the odds will probably increase the prospect of others being able to sell their gardens at a reasonable price.
There was also some optimism from traditional tea purists who saw the garden changing hands from a group with no background or commitment to Darjeeling, to us, who really have a passion for Darjeeling and some understanding of it. I want to burst their bubble a little bit by saying that this acquisition was really not something my mind advised me to do.
Wherever we are today, as a group in terms of our financial standing, in terms of our business tactics, I owe a lot of this to Darjeeling. These gardens have also played a role in helping us achieve something. So I just told myself that if I am going to lose a lot of money, I am paying it back to Darjeeling to give it one shot.
When the gardens were owned by the Kejriwal family, I was deeply associated with these properties. And that is one of the reasons my heart took over because I have spent time in these gardens, I have bought thousands and thousands of tons of their teas over the years, and I have marketed these teas.
But should my acquisition give hope to people? God no!
There is optimism, but the optimism is for different reasons, some of which are selfish, some of which are daunting. As I said, I’m not here to make a statement. I know what I’m going to do. I have plans to make the gardens much better managed. They are already in play. We are seeing some differences at the ground level day by day. Other than that, is it going to be economically viable? I don’t know.
Kanoria with his wife, Vrinda and younger daughter, Parthivi.
*Beginning in 1983 growers in Darjeeling sought to register the 87 gardens there as a protected Geographical Indication. The European Union granted GI protection in 2011. Prior to that time, many teas sold as Darjeeling were blended with similar teas for consistency year to year, an accepted practice. In other instances, these teas were blended (up to 50%) with inferior teas and marketed as Darjeeling. The GI rules allowed a period of transition to deplete stock and then required blenders and growers to market only teas grown within the recognized boundaries as Darjeeling. Teas qualify for a seal of authenticity for marketing purposes and legal remedies if fraudulent brands are sold.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jungpana and Goomtee Tea Estates
The two estates are located 12 kilometers from Kurseong in steep and remote terrain. Roads are primitive and the factory is connected through a snaking pathway, accessible only on foot. Jungpana, founded in 1931, is spread over 78 acres (32 hectares) at 3,300 to 4,900 feet above sea level. On arrival, visitors must climb more than 350 steep steps on a pathway to the garden factory that crosses a footbridge over Changey Khola, a small fast-moving mountain stream. Surrounding areas include the Goomtee Tea Estate, a 600-acre expanse of land with forests, mountain slopes, streams, waterfalls, and tea fields.