Tagged: mcleod russel

The Arithmetic of a Garden Closure

A tea garden does not close on one bad season. It closes when the cost of producing a kilo of tea sits above what the auction will pay for long enough that debt outruns the harvest, and the numbers behind that threshold, from Assam's slow squeeze to Darjeeling's shuttered gates, are public.

Tea Has No Nestle

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.

The Companies of Tea

Who actually owns the tea industry, in four models: the colonial-rooted plantation company, the farmer-owned cooperative federation, the state-linked enterprise, and the family holding group or global blender. What each looks like, where each dominates, and why the model determines who absorbs a bad harvest.