SPILL:
THE NEW EVERYDAY TEA

Call us bold but we think these principles will start to change the tea industry. It’s the model we’ll follow as we continue to buy tea.

Clue’s in the name. We’ll tell all. What the farmer is paid and their stories. Our thinking is – if everyone started asking and telling what the smallholder farmer is paid, we’d get a clearer view of the problem, and be closer to being able to tackle it.

SPILL tea is from Rugabano in Rwanda and is what they call “single origin”. The tea here tastes so good it doesn’t need to be blended.

Big hills, volcanic soil, tropical sunshine, heavy showers; these are the things that make great tasting tea and Rwanda has the lot.

CATALYST

Traditionally, tea brands buy teas from different countries and blend them all together. But you can’t buy tea from a smallholder farmer directly — it has to be processed by a factory first. And even then, tea gets bought in a mixture of ways: some direct from the factory, some via auction, some through brokers or traders, often a blend of all three.

This makes things murky. It makes it difficult to know what the smallholder farmer who grew the tea has actually been paid.

That can’t be right.

WHO GREW YOUR TEA?

We tend to think of tea as being grown on big sweeping estates and a lot of it is.

But 70% of the world’s tea is grown by smallholder farmers; that’s farmers with less than 1 hectare of land on average – basically, a really big tea garden.

THE SOLUTION

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.

If you’d rather keep the punch of each action on its own line (nice for a sales page, gives it a manifesto-like rhythm), here’s that version:

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.

OUR PRODUCTS