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.

The Tea Auctions

How tea is priced and sold. The canonical reference on the world's tea auctions: how a sale actually works, the major centres at Mombasa, Colombo, and across India, the move from the outcry floor to the screen, and what an auction price really means.