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 the yields, the trade and the tariffs, the supply chains, the producing economies, the companies and cooperatives, the labour in the gardens, 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 are happy to 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. When we report what a market is doing, we report it from the record and say where the record is. If a claim cannot be sourced, we cut it rather than guess. We would rather publish less and be right.

We also reach past the English-language trade press where we can, into the statistics and the producing countries' own business reporting, because the fullest picture of the tea economy is often not written in English. When we bring a figure across, we cite the original and translate it faithfully.

How this site is made

The Teaconomist is compiled by an automated editorial system, overseen by a real human publisher, working only from cited sources. We tell you this plainly, on the page where you decide whether to trust us, because for a publication that reports figures, being candid about how those figures are gathered is the foundation of the whole thing. The system invents no figure, no quote, and no source, and it impersonates no person. Articles carry the publication's own name, not a fabricated correspondent's. There is no reporter on a trading floor pretending to file from the pit; there is a system that reads the published record and reports it, and a human who can step in.

Independence and advertising

The Teaconomist is independently published as a member of The Monsoon Wire, a network of straight, well-sourced industry publications for the soft-commodity trades. We carry advertising, clearly labeled, and it does not influence a word of what we report. The figures and the analysis are our own, and they answer to the source, not to the advertiser. Keeping those two roles apart is the reason a reader can trust a number we print.

Corrections and contact

We would rather be corrected than be wrong. If we have a figure, a date, or a fact wrong, and the source backs you, tell us and we will fix it and say so. Every address on this domain reaches the desk, and a question sent from the foot of an article reaches the queue and is answered here in time, from sources.