The tea trade is the chain of hands a leaf passes through between the garden where it is plucked and the cup where it is drunk, and the system of prices set at each link. It is a large business built on a cheap product. Tea is, after water, the most widely drunk beverage on earth, made from the leaves of a single evergreen, Camellia sinensis, grown as a plantation crop in more than two dozen countries, and the world produces something on the order of six to seven million tonnes of it a year, by the reckoning of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. This newspaper exists to read that business by the figures. This page is the map of it: how the leaf reaches the cup, how its price is set on the way, and who takes what share. The detail on the pricing floor lives in The Auctions, and the detail on the growers in Who Grows It; this is the overview they hang from.

From bush to cup: the chain

A made tea passes through a fixed sequence of owners, and the price changes hands at each step.

• The garden. Tea begins as green leaf plucked from the bush, by hand on the better estates and increasingly by machine elsewhere. Green leaf is perishable and cannot travel far, so it must be processed within hours of plucking.
• The factory. The leaf is withered, rolled or cut, oxidised, and dried into "made tea," the dark, shelf-stable product the world trades. A large estate runs its own factory; a smallholder sells green leaf to a nearby bought-leaf factory that does the making.
• The sale. The made tea is sold, either through a public auction or by private contract direct to a buyer. The auction is where most of the world's traded tea meets its price.
• The blender and packer. A handful of large companies buy made tea in bulk, blend many lots into a consistent product, and pack it under the consumer brands a shopper recognises. Most tea is a blend; the brand on the box is a recipe, not a garden.
• The retailer. The packed tea reaches the shelf, and the shopper pays a price into which the whole chain, plus the retailer's own margin, has been folded.

The single most important fact about this chain is that almost all the value a shopper pays for is added after the leaf leaves the producing country. The garden sells a cheap raw commodity; the blending, branding, and retailing that turn it into a premium product on a Western shelf happen at the far end, and capture most of the money. That is the structure the rest of this guide, and much of this newspaper, returns to.

Two ways to make black tea: CTC and orthodox

Most of the world's tea is black tea, and black tea is made by one of two methods, which the trade treats almost as two separate products.

• CTC (crush, tear, curl) runs the leaf through toothed rollers that cut it into hard, uniform granules. It is fast, cheap, and machine-friendly, it dominates production in India and Kenya, and it is what fills the tea bags of the world. CTC tea is built for a strong, quick, consistent cup taken with milk.
• Orthodox keeps the leaf whole or in large pieces, rolled rather than cut, and takes far longer to make. It yields the graded loose-leaf teas sold at higher prices, where size and tip and origin matter.

The split matters to the trade because the two command different prices and serve different markets. CTC is the commodity engine, sold by the tonne into mass blends; orthodox is the speciality end, where a named garden and a fine grade can fetch a premium. A country's mix of the two shapes what its crop is worth.

How the price is set

For most of the tea that crosses a border, the price is discovered at auction. A producer consigns made tea to a broker; the broker catalogues it, draws samples, and offers the lots at a weekly public sale where licensed buyers, the agents of the big blenders, bid each lot down to the highest offer. The auction is a genuine price-discovery mechanism: it sets a public, visible price for a given grade from a given origin, week by week, against live supply and demand.

The trade once had a single global price-setting floor. From 1679 until 1998, the London auction on Mincing Lane was where the world bought tea, and by the 1950s about a third of all the world's tea was sold through it. That floor has since moved to the producing countries themselves, above all to the Mombasa auction in Kenya, now the largest in the world. The full account of how a sale works, and where the centres are, is in The Auctions.

Where the money goes

Because the value is added at the far end of the chain, the growers at the near end receive a small and often volatile share of the final price. The Fairtrade Foundation reports that tea growers earn only a fraction of what tea fetches in the shops of Europe and the United States, that smallholders who produce much of the crop in Kenya and Sri Lanka receive low and fluctuating prices, and that wages on tea plantations sit around national legal minimums and rarely amount to a living wage. The leaf is cheap; keeping it cheap has a cost, and that cost lands on the people nearest the bush.

This newspaper does not editorialise the figures, but it does insist on reporting them. A market that delivers the world its second drink for a fraction of a cent a cup is an achievement of logistics and a question of distribution at the same time, and the auction sheets, dull as they look, say so plainly. Who grows the tea, and under what terms, is set out in Who Grows It.

The bureau's read

The tea trade is best understood as a long chain that turns a cheap, perishable leaf into a cheap, durable, branded product, adding nearly all of its value after the leaf has left the country that grew it. Read it that way and the rest follows: why producing countries push to "add value" at home rather than export raw leaf, why a drought in Assam or Kenya moves a price in London, and why the economics of tea are, at bottom, the economics of who captures the margin on something the world drinks three billion cups of a day. The figures are the story. This newspaper reads them so the reader need not.