Tagged: tea auction
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.
Darjeeling's Priciest Tea Isn't Its Biggest Earner
A handful of spring-plucked Darjeeling lots sell for the price of silver, but the season's real income comes two months later, from a flush that never makes the headlines.
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.
Assam's Tea Economy
Assam alone grows more tea than any country except China and India itself, over half of India's total, out of three ownership models sharing one valley: private estates, a shrinking state corporation, and small growers who now supply more leaf than either.
Darjeeling's Tea Economy
Darjeeling's tea output has roughly halved in a decade and roughly half its 87 gardens have been reported as financially distressed, while the name itself has become the most heavily registered and most tightly licensed geographical indication in tea.
India's Tea Industry
The world's second-largest tea producer is also its largest tea-drinking nation, and the two facts explain most of the rest. How a colonial plantation crop became four distinct growing regions, a smallholder majority the estates did not see coming, an auction system half its own producers now want to escape, and a trade caught between a record export year and three separate fights over access.
KTDA, the Company That Runs Kenya's Smallholder Tea
One management company runs the factories that process tea for roughly 600,000 Kenyan smallholders, pays them on a two-tier system split between a monthly rate and a year-end bonus, and answers to no single owner. Here is how it is built, how the money moves, and where the fights over it keep breaking out.
The Tea Board of India
The statutory body that licenses every tea garden in the country, forces half the crop through public auction, and owns the Darjeeling name outright. It was built on a cess that no longer exists, and the mandate it still enforces is the one producers keep asking Delhi to repeal.
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.
The Price of Tea
The canonical reference on what sets a tea's price. What fixes it at the point of sale, why the real-terms trend has run downhill for a century, where the money goes once the leaf clears the gate, what moves it between sales, and what a certification label actually adds.