The packaging script of popular teabags are long on praise and hype, but contain no real information about the provenance of the tea. Can anybody here tell me where Lipton, Red Rose, etc. are grown and how they are processed and blended? They often claim to be "orange pekoe and pekoe" which impies Indian origin, but that is only part of the story. Is this stuff really just the sweepings off the tea processors' factory floors?
Even the internet search engines produce no information that I've been able to find about the subject. Are Lipton's sources a proprietary secret?
The commercial teas are proprietary blends. It doesn't matter if loose or bagged. They insure the same consistent taste. At best they might list the countries of origin on the packaging. Lipton has plantations in India so they bypass the middle man at auction. Bagged tea is generally fines from India,Ceylon,Africa and BOP from Asia. The grade doesn't determine the taste. I think it is an urban myth they are from the factory floor. Normally it results from the sifting process or the last screen. I can find cheaper loose teas from India in the ethnic stores than teabags in my local grocery. In general loose is preferred over teabags but they are more convenient. I don't think in general that teabags perse are 'inferior' from any short cuts. It is a result of convenience, price and a particular taste. Lipton US teabags are formulated for iced tea. Teabags themselves have ergonometrics like bleached,unbleached glued,staple bag,disc flowthru,single that might alter the taste. When I use teabags it is with a pot and not a cup.
It is largely a mystery which is where I think a lot of the speculation about floor sweepings come from. It is most likely blended from some pretty good teas, just that what is used is the unused fine bits from processing and selling the full leaves and prettier stuff. It is still tea and can produce a decent cup, just not a nice full leaf that will unfurl beautifully and command top dollar.
Lipton has their own trees, and many others probably contract with certain growers. I would imagine a few may buy lots at auction, but this would not afford the consistency the main brands are known for. And that is the real amazing part of many bagged teas, consistency. A cup of Lipton today will be just like the one I had sitting in tepid water at a convention 4 years ago and at the next convention in 2018. There is a lot to be said for that in tea. I don't thin the sources are the secret, more the blending with these teas. The sheer amount of tea consumed by these companies would make it easy to trace if you talked to a few of the right people.
If I've got my story straight, Lipton owns quite a few tea gardens in Sri Lanka/Ceylon. Probably safe to assume that a good bit of Ceylon goes into their tea.
@ Rich. What others in this string have said about the word grade in tea referring to leaf size and not to quality is correct. Every tea factory produces large leaf teas all the way down to dusts. Frequently, a factory's dusts fetch higher prices in the world market than the large leaf (OP is a large leaf grade) teas.
"Orange Pekoe and Pekoe" do not actually imply Indian origin. These grade names were first coined in China, moved onto India, and then onwards to every other tea growing origin on earth.
The blends of the major brands are proprietary secrets. Within a given market like the USA, the different brands have numerous blends. Unilever (Lipton & Brooke Bond) for example private label packs all of WalMart's teas which are quite poor. This was not Unilever's choice, it was a radically low price limit that was forced upon them by their customer that obliges them to use rubbish in the WalMart blends. In sum, you have two tiers for the blenders - their own famous brands and those for which they private-label package like the supermarket chains and institutional accounts. On the institutional market, if you say compare a teabag of Red Rose's from their own brand pack to the one they private-label for the restaurant industry at say McDonalds, you will find the qualities different as night and day.
The major blenders (Unilever/UK/NL is the world's largest, TataTetley/India is number two and Dilmah/SriLanka is number three) customize their blends to each geography into which they sell to adjust for the varying consumer tastes and the varying local characteristics like hard vs soft tap waters etc.
Unilever and Tata are both in the process of divesting themselves of the tea estate assets in India. It's expected they will do the same in other tea regions like Africa pretty soon as well.The only new country investment in tea estates made in the past decade of the two companies was in Turkey by Unilever. Turkey, a huge high quality tea consuming nation, refuses to drink its own lousy teas - they import mostly Ceylon's for that purpose, while they export their own crop mostly to the US for Lipton's WalMart blends.
The leading countries supplying the USA with most of its teas are in approximate order: China, Argentina, Indonesia, Vietnam and Turkey. While Indonesia, China and particularly Vietnam make some gorgeous teas, those aren't the ones coming into the USA in volume.
So far as the weekly and fortnitely world tea aucti> The packaging script of popular teabags are long on praise and hype, but
Depends. They are blended from teas grown in India, Africa, and often Argentina. These teas are normally machine-harvested with hedge shears or similar to just take everything off the plant, and they are harvested continuously rather than in individual flushes.
They are not, BUT the particular blend they use is a proprietary secret and it changes from batch to batch. Remember their notion here is to make tea that is uniform from bag to bag, and therefore their blend gets alterated to compensate for changes in the source materials.
Thanks for the compliment on the economics of the global tea trade, moreso than just the blended tea segment of it. As a founding partner in a Mombasa Tea Auctioneer firm (a "selling brokerage" meaning one who works for the benefit of the tea producers in its weekly auction catalog) and having interests in one of their opposites in Colombo, Sri Lanka, I assure you that tea is a fascinating edible commodity in many senses.
While the global trade in raw tea far exceeds that in raw coffee now as ever going back centuries, tea remains the only major edible commodity on earth with no futures traded on it on the developed world futures markets (US, UK, Europe, Japan, Australia). The reason why is simple - the industry has never wanted non-tea-experts speculating on the the price on our commodity in an unknowledgeable fashion. Depending on the size of the non-tea-expert players, some of those big kids could make topsy-turvy of a global market which has nicely self-regulated prices for centuries based on the elegant econometric beauty of pure supply and demand for all qualities manufactured at all origins.
The five origins I mentioned are five of the six ones with weekly or fortnitely tea auctions globally. Bangladesh also has a bouyant weekly tea auction for its production and that country rounds out the total six where tea is grown and regularly auctioned; I didn't mention it as the sixth at first because most all its tea in the Chittagong auction is used for internal domestic packaging to serve the domestic market.
The six countries' weekly weighted composite sets the weekly world price for tea. In the weighting, Ceylon's Colombo Auction and Kenya's Mombasa Auction combined dominate because those two countries are the world's two top exporters of bulk tea in tonnage, and in the case of Sri Lanka, in dollar value as well.
China is interested in establishing their own weekly tea auction for the first time ever, and their opposites in the Calcutta, Colombo and Mombasa auctions have been consulting China starting this past six months on how best to establish same.
On your question about practical and politically reasons for Unilever's auctions' participations.
The practical is easy - they simply need the weekly / fortnitely weights of tea at the six origin auction countries in order to make their weekly global blends. This has always been the case.
The politically correct is naturally more sensitive as well as more complex - it boils down to this - since the time of wholesale global privitasation of the tea production industry which took place during the early 1990's, it has become imperative that major publically owned multinationals like Unilever "do the right thing" vis a vis sourcing with price transparancy in those six countries which hold weekly / fortnitely auctions.
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