The tea industry is a fifty billion dollar a year business whose fastest growing sector is called ‘Specialty Tea.’ ‘Specialty Tea.’ must be defined to establish value and give meaning to the term.
There are no set standards for excellence in the global tea industry. Merchants, both in the past and now, have been able to get away with defining quality through marketing. This interpretive and loose value system has not benefitted producers, consumers, or small tea businesses.
The International Specialty Tea Association will strive to establish quality standards in tea making. The Specialty Tea Association will create an unbiased process for judging tea quality. This will result in the best teas setting the bar for standards of excellence, which will thereby define ‘Specialty Tea.’ The evaluating system will be easily understandable and learnable industry-wide and will be made available to the public.
Standards must be established to preserve the art of making tea and will guarantee a stabilized market whose focus and intent is on providing quality products to the consumer. The value of tea will then be determined by its production rather than how it is marketed. This will increase profits to producers and the people they employ. Standards will provide the platform on which small businesses can compete with the corporate tea companies that dominate the global market, and consumers will be able to recognize product value independent of marketing claims. Standards will cause getter transparency in the supply chain, and a better educated industry.
Learn more at Seven Cups.
When do you expect these standards will be determined? I think it’s a vital step toward providing consumers with the criteria they need to determine what is the best tea that is available.
Good luck Austin with your WTE nomination!
It is like to take some time Michelle. Standards for Speciality Coffee were set in 1972, and not until 2002 the archiving excellence in coffee really become apparent in the market until 2002 with the emergence of Third Wave Coffee. This will be an effort with an eye to long term change. Tea is complex and a whole non-merchant infrastructure must be developed as it did in coffee. To get an idea of what it might look like down the road, check out the Specialty Coffee website. My goal has been just to get the conversation started.
Standards were set when tea was taken out of China four hundred years ago by Europeans but a time has come to recast them as the information technology has increased the craving for more knowledge and understanding of issues and betterment of quality for health issues.