About The Teaconomist

The Teaconomist reports one thing: the business of tea. Not how it tastes or how to brew it, but how it works as an industry and a market. The auction prices and what moves them, the harvests and yields, trade and tariffs, the supply chains, the producing economies, the companies and cooperatives, garden labour, and what a changing climate does to the crop. We read tea the way a market is read, by the figures, and we explain what the figures mean.

What we cover, and what we leave to others

We keep to the trade. If a question is about the cup, how a single tea tastes, how to steep it, which leaf to buy, it belongs on a consumer tea site, and we will point you to one. Our subject is the leaf as a commodity: the most widely drunk beverage on earth after water, grown in more than two dozen countries and traded as a cheap, global staple. The economics of that, plainly explained and properly sourced, is the whole of our remit.

How we work

Every figure on these pages is taken from a real, published source and attributed to it. We do not estimate a number and present it as reported, we do not predict a price, and we do not give investment advice. We report the market; we do not tip one. If a claim cannot be sourced, we cut it rather than guess, and we would rather publish less and be right. Where the fullest figures are in another language, we reach past the English-language trade press, cite the original, and translate it faithfully.

If a figure, a date, or a fact is wrong and the source backs you, tell us and we will fix it, with a dated correction noted in place.