The Companies of Tea

Coffee has Nestle and JAB. Tea has no equivalent. Here is who actually moves the world's leaf, from a Kenyan cooperative managing 600,000 farmers to a private-equity-owned spinout carrying billions in debt, and why no one has consolidated the trade the way coffee's owners have.

Why Kenya's Tea Factories Never Consolidated

Kenya split its tea sector into roughly 70 small, farmer-owned factories and never merged them, even as Assam's estates consolidated under debt and Sri Lanka's state gardens were carved into fewer corporate players. The reasons are structural, legal, and, once, deliberately blocked at a shareholder vote.