The Tea Trade Fought to Keep America's Border Tea Tasters
From 1897 to 1996 the US sampled every lot of imported tea against a federal standard. The trade lobbied to keep it, and paid the meeting expenses of the board that recommended the standard.
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Public Law 104-128, approved on April 9, 1996, had one stated purpose: "To eliminate the Board of Tea Experts by repealing the Tea Importation Act of 1897."1 Under that Act, tea was the only food or beverage for which the Food and Drug Administration sampled every lot on entry for comparison with a standard recommended by a federal board. A House committee reported it that year2.
The 1996 repeal "was not supported by industry, which lobbied against the repeal," Patricia DeWitt wrote in a 2000 Harvard Law School paper3.
In 1970, by the account of Martin Anderson, a former White House staff member, a Nixon administration bill to end the board was "quashed by tea industry lobbyists"3.
A standard set at the lowest grade fit for use
The Tea Importation Act was approved on March 2, 18974. An 1883 law already barred tea "adulterated with spurious or exhausted leaves," but, as an appeals court later put it, the law "contained no provision for the establishment of government standards."4
The 1897 Senate commerce committee report said American consumers were drinking "the lowest average grade of tea ever before known."4 It proposed standards at the "lowest grades of tea fit for use," to protect the consumer against "worthless rubbish."
Without standards, a disputed shipment went to arbitration, and the outcomes varied. The house of Purdon & Wiggin offered about 200,000 pounds of Amoy tea that arbitration rejected, a loss the Senate report said helped bring about the firm's bankruptcy. A short time later another importer brought in a shipment twice as large of the same grade, DeWitt records from that report3.
The Act had the Secretary of the Treasury appoint a board of tea experts each year to prepare standard samples. The board had seven members on one-year terms, each paid $50 a year3. The samples went to the customhouses at New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other ports, and were supplied to importers and dealers at cost4.
From May 1, 1897, it was unlawful to import as tea any merchandise "inferior in purity, quality, and fitness for consumption to the standards."4 Examiners tested by the customs of the trade, "including the test of an infusion of the same in boiling water," with chemical analysis if necessary. Rejected tea had to be exported within six months or be destroyed.
What the courts allowed the board to decide
On February 7, 1902, examiners rejected an importer's "Country green teas" as "inferior to standard in quality." Quality meant cup quality, "that is to say, its taste and flavor."4
In Buttfield v. Stranahan, the importer argued that setting standards was legislative power Congress could not delegate. On February 23, 1904, the Supreme Court held that Congress "was compelled to leave to executive officials the duty of bringing about the result pointed out by the statute."4
The Court also held that "no individual has a vested right to trade with foreign nations," and that destroying unexported tea after six months was "not wanting in due process of law."
A San Francisco shipment of green tea carried a trace of Prussian blue colouring, and a Treasury rule made any colouring an absolute ground for exclusion5. The tea was worth about four times the standard on the open market, DeWitt writes3.
In 1918 Justice Holmes, for the Court, struck the rule down. "It cannot be made a rule of law,"5 he wrote, that tea with "an infinitesimal amount of innocuous coloring matter" is inferior to a standard "worth only a quarter as much."
How the board survived
By Anderson's account, in 1970 the Nixon administration chose the tea board for elimination "simply to prove that it could be done"3 and struck it from the budget. It then learned that only an act of Congress could end the board, and Congress declined, saying the savings were too small.
In 1993 Congress and the trade reached a compromise: the Act would not be repealed if the industry picked up the tab3. The board's own expenses, about $7,000 a year, passed to the industry, and the inspection fee rose from 3.5 cents to 10 cents per hundredweight (100 pounds).
The House report of 1996 confirms the arrangement: "Board members' expenses to participate in the annual standard-setting meeting are paid by the tea industry."2 The board met once a year for two days. Between meetings, "FDA chemists examine, taste, and smell imported teas and reject teas which do not meet the annual standards."
The higher fee became law on August 10, 1993, but it was not collected. Because of an oversight in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, Customs kept charging 3.5 cents, collecting about $70,000 in each of fiscal 1994 and 1995, the Congressional Budget Office wrote in February 19962. At 10 cents, it estimated, collections would be about $200,000 a year.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada complained that taxpayers were still paying the $68,600 salary of Robert Dick, the FDA chemist who ran the board, the Associated Press reported in September 19956.
A public standard the trade counted as its own
In fiscal 1994 the United States imported 209 million pounds of tea valued at about $136 million2, about 65 cents a pound. Of the program's cost to taxpayers, DeWitt writes, "no estimate exceeds $200,000."3
Joseph Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the USA, gave the trade's reason in the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal in December 1995. "Having the Tea Importation Act is a signal to all the growers of the world over that the U.S. is not the place to unload your adulterated tea,"3 he said. It "also provides a first line of defense for the industry."
The Ways and Means Committee saw "no justification for tea being held to a higher federal standard on behalf of the tea industry, which should assume responsibility for the competitive quality of its products."2
Reid was the Act's most vocal opponent. "These tea-tasting people are just like lizards," he said in 1995. "You grab them and jerk something off and they are right back." In February 1996 he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "I put a hold on everything and said nothing's going to happen until we get the tea board taken care of."3
After the repeal
The Act stood 99 years. The FDA kept its authority under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 to sample imported tea for health and safety. Tea "will not be compared with a quality standard set each year,"2 the committee wrote.
The board stayed on the FDA's list of standing advisory committees. On September 19, 2023, the FDA removed it in a final rule that "aligns FDA's list of standing advisory committees with existing law."7