Tagged: value chain
Why Is Tea So Cheap?
Tea's auction price has gone nowhere for 20 years and now sits below what was paid a century ago, in real terms. Here is what the figures say is actually happening, and who is absorbing the squeeze.
Who Makes Money From a Cup of Tea?
A 2019 field study traced a kilogram of Assam tea through five pairs of hands and found the factory keeps the largest cut, ahead of the farm. A 2021 study of Vietnam's Thai Nguyen chain found close to the opposite. The arithmetic behind both.
What a Certification Label Pays the Tea Grower
Fairtrade mandates a fixed 50 US cent per kilo premium on tea but only around 4 percent of eligible production is ever sold on those terms. Rainforest Alliance covers far more of the world's tea at a smaller, now-negotiable premium. Kenya's factories tried to opt out entirely in 2025. The figures behind all three.
The Economics of the Tea Bag: How a Packing Machine, Not the Leaf, Built the Format Most of the World Drinks
The tea bag began as a shipping accident, but what made it cheap enough to dominate the world market was a German packing machine, and what still shapes its cost today is the material of the sachet itself.
How the Tea Trade Works
The canonical map of the tea business, from garden to auction to shelf. What tea is as a commodity, the path the leaf takes to the cup, how its price is set, and where the money along the way actually ends up.