SPILL Tea
Tea is too cheap. We’ve been drinking tea for 300 years. A kilo of tea cost around £1,000 back then, now you can get a kilo for £2. Mad. Hard work goes into growing, picking, processing, packing, branding and selling tea. But the rewards for doing each job are not equal. Most of the money is made in the UK. Too little is made where the tea is grown.
Traditionally, tea brands buy teas from different countries and blend them all together. You can't buy tea from a smallholder farmer directly. It has to be processed by the factory before it can be bought. And tea can be bought in a mixture of ways... Some direct from the factory, some via auction, some via brokers or traders. Sometimes, a mixture. This makes things murky. And makes it difficult to know what the smallholder farmer who grew the tea has been paid. That can't be right.
So we thought "let's start again". Find a great tasting tea that hits the spot. Buy the tea direct. Talk to farmers, understand what they need. Pay the farmers more. Be open about payments to farmers. For you, a better cuppa. For the farmer, a better price.
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The story behind the business
Meet SPILL Tea
Lou can’t function until she’s had 2 cups of tea in the morning. Two. Made and drunk at the same time. Before 8am. Lou co-founded teapigs in 2006 and Sofia joined just after. We worked together to grow it into a much-loved brand. Lou was a tea buyer and taster for Tetley before that so between us, we’ve worked in tea longer than we like to remember.
A lot has changed in tea since then. We drink all different kinds of tea now - herbal, green, white. But not a lot has changed in the tea we drink every day - our black tea, which goes by many names - ‘normal’, ‘english (breakfast)’, ‘builders’ etc.
It’s still the tea we drink the most, by a long way - 3 cups a day each. But we don't give it much thought. And rather than getting better over the years, our everyday tea has got cheaper and cheaper. This means we've got used to it tasting "meh" and the farmers who grow it live in poverty. Meanwhile, we’ve thought about other things we use all the time and given them an upgrade - coffee (artisan), bread (sourdough) and beer (craft). But if you’re going to do something 3 times a day, you should feel good about it. So we’ve made an everyday tea that tastes like good tea should taste; fuller, bolder, brighter. The kind of tea you'll want to drink everyday.
And it pays farmers more. We're starting small, but big things start that way. We hope you love it.
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