All our base teas are selected and imported by local suppliers, who maintain close contact and frequently visit plantation managers in each origin country, to ensure consistency of quality, taste, plus safe working and social conditions. Tea estates in every country also provide a lot of reliable jobs for their local communities, as many people’s effort goes into hand-picking each leaf, withering, rolling, drying - basically, creating the best tea leaves for your perfect cup.

Our teas also go through strict quality controls, including microbiological analyses and screening for pesticides, heavy metals, aflatoxins, and other production residue, so you can rest assured that the tea in your cup is the purest.

We then take these high quality teas and get to work in our tea "laboratory", making delicious experiments in blending them together, or adding dried fruits, flowers, herbs, fresh ground spices, fruit extracts, and flavor extracts. We formulate all our flavors to be bold and soulful, testing multiple times to ensure that the natural taste of the tea is not lost, but only enhanced by the addition of flavor.

So, why do we use plastic at all? Why not compostable/biodegradable?

First off, the aroma and flavor compounds contained in tea leaves are easily affected by light and air. A strong, lightweight material like PET plastic (#1 recycle code) provides protection and preserves each tea’s unique aromas and flavors.

Plastic lined pouches and boxes are commonplace in the food & beverage industry, solely because it provides this protective barrier for freshness. However, if the plastic is fused to other materials (for example, plastic lined kraft pouches), both materials usually become non-recyclable and has to go straight in the trash. Of course to combat this, there has been an uptick of various compostable packaging options and other sustainable innovations to package food & beverages.

We carefully researched all these available options and found that, while compostable options and other recent biodegradable innovations are all incredibly significant strides towards a greener future, most local small cities do not have the infrastructure in place to handle these new materials. Most sustainable packaging are only commercial compostable in industrial machines that are not available everywhere (they cannot be placed in a home compost bin), so they sadly end up in the landfill anyway. Further, most of these new materials require industrial manufacturing/packaging equipment that are quite a bit expensive and are giant machines, which is not possible for us to acquire at this time.

As a local small business with customers that live around a small town, our best option was double packaging instead - an outer kraft packaging and an inner PET pouch. Both are extremely recyclable and get converted back into new packaging, or other useful materials across many industries. All our products come printed with convenient recycle codes so please make sure to aid us in our sustainability efforts!

So we’ve established that our packaging can’t yet be compostable…but, what about the used tea leaves after you finish your cuppa? That is where a home compost bin comes in (and even if you don’t compost, your tea leaves can still be put to work).

Some of our team members collect their day’s worth of tea leaves at home and directly dump them into flower pots and garden beds, and let nature take its course! However, not all plants like the acidity and other nutrient compounds that tea contains, so we recommend doing your research. Furthermore, if you take your tea with milk & sugar, definitely avoid fertilizing your plants directly.

Home compost bins, on the other hand, are the perfect place to put any tea waste, where it will increase nitrogen/oxygen levels and help break down your other compost ingredients. If you don’t actively maintain a compost bin, you could also look for a nearby farm that would love to take in your pure & organic fertilizer - just collect the used tea over a longer period of time, so you have a sizeable amount to give them.

Our Tea Lounge is aiming towards doing exactly that! We produce too much tea waste for a home compost or garden, so we are looking for organic farms that will take our used tea leaves on a monthly basis. If you own a farm and would like to partner with us, please contact us at hello@assamicateas.com.