Explainers
Who Makes Money From a Cup of Tea?
A 2019 field study traced a kilogram of Assam tea through five pairs of hands and found the factory keeps the largest cut, ahead of the farm. A 2021 study of Vietnam's Thai Nguyen chain found close to the opposite. The arithmetic behind both.
A Tea's Grade Is a Size Code, Not a Quality Score
A tea's grade, OP, BOP, PD, Dust, is a sorting code, not a quality score, and it is the single biggest reason two kilos of tea from the same garden sell for very different prices at auction.
Why Doesn't Tea Have a Futures Market?
Coffee has traded futures since 1882 and cocoa since the 1920s. Tea, which outsells them both, has never had one, anywhere. The reason is not price stability. It is that no two lots of tea are the same thing.
Why a Screen Never Replaced the Tea Broker
A licensed broker still takes roughly one percent of a tea auction's value for cataloguing, tasting, and vouching for a lot no algorithm grades, and one century-old exchange has brought its old open-outcry room back after going fully digital. Here is what the commission buys, and why regulators keep steering trade through it.
Kenya's Tea Farmers Took Home Less in a Year the Shilling Got Stronger
A tea garden is paid in its own currency for a crop sold against the US dollar, so the exchange rate can move a season's income more than the harvest does. Kenya and India lived through opposite versions of that mechanism in the same year.