As consumers, ourselves, we seek to “go green”, including being conscious of our diet to make it increasingly consist of all-natural and organic, etc., as much as we can without having the control of living on a farm/ranch where we grow all of our own food. So it seemed only natural when we formed KTeas that we would seek to have most, if not all, of our teas be Organic. . . . Easier said than done, it turns out. We are sure that many of you have already traveled farther along this road to knowledge than we have. Nonetheless, we thought we’d share some of our own journey along this particular path and relate its own Intersection of Life and Tea.
The murkiness or lack of clarity on the matter of Organic, and of Labeling and Marketing your product as Organic, is not limited to tea. As I said, we strive to “go organic” in our personal lives, so when we recently met a local honey producer, we asked if their honey is organic? The answer we got was quite an education in itself. The main points of the answer are as follows:
“The reason is that bees fly up to 2 miles to collect nectar so, while a beekeeper’s home/farm/orchard may adhere to organic guidelines, our neighbors may not . . . Since there are very, very few places in the world that can raise organic honey (you'd need a plot of land at least 4 miles in diameter and your bees would need to be in the center)--they are certified organic - and the rest of us are not permitted to use the word organic in marketing. . . . "Organic" is good but rare so you should always look for RAW honey - that means the footprint of the honey is from comb, through a filtering system and straight into the bottle. Most (if not all) large honey distributors - like Sue Bee - gather honey from a large number of beekeepers (both domestic and foreign), combine the honeys then pasteurize/boil the honeys in order to maintain a consistent color and flavor over their stock. Boiling removes the enzymes, microscopic particles of pollen and propolis and basically renders the honey a different flavor and not as beneficial as raw, local honey.”
Suddenly, after reading that explanation, I began to understand better why I’d been recently seeing so much fuss about local stores carrying raw milk.
You may think that whether honey can be marketed as organic has nothing to do with whether tea is organic. Recall that the purpose of the regulations and certifications and seals in the U.S. is to protect the consumer from unscrupulous businesses using the word “organic” willy-nilly so that they may cash in on the buzzword even if the products are not entirely, or perhaps not at all, organic.
The idea is to allow the consumer to simply look at a label and by seeing that USDA Organic stamp of approval through the NOP (National Organic Program), be able to trust that the integrity of the tea leaf (or any ingredient used in the tisane) has been protected all the way from growth in the plantation without pesticides and chemical fertilizers that compromise the natural state of the plant and leave toxins in our bodies, grown by farmers emphasizing the use of renewable resources and conservation of soil and water, right through the processing as tea and shipment to facilities where it’s packaged under organic conditions. That’s a good thing.
But the impact on small businesses goes a lot farther than local honey companies not being able to market their honey as organic because they cannot afford to have a plot of land large enough to ensure that the plants their bees pollinate have all been grown with organic practices.
We have read, for example, that some small wineries, like family-owned-and-run, may have similar problems. Even if they may be Organic in practice, they may have not yet managed to get Certified Organic, so they cannot market themselves as Organic.
What’s more, returning to the topic of tea, consider that camellia sinensis is almost exclusively grown and processed into tea elsewhere, not in the United States. Sometimes, the problem with labeling and marketing organic may be a matter of: the U.S. end of the operation has not been able to get the entire operation certified to USA stipulations. In order to display that USDA NOP certification, every step along the way, each link in the chain must be certified, at Source as well as the processing plant or warehouse here in the States. At present, the USDA does not simply accept that if something is EEC Certified Organic or Japan certified, for example, then it is certified organic and they can put their stamp of approval on it.
One European-based tea business from whom we’ve purchased tea as consumers has this to say on their site:
“Teas with the “Bio” or EEC Organic symbol are certified Organic in Europe. Teas with the USDA Organic symbol are certified Organic in the United States. Selections marked ‘made with organic tea’ have a USDA Organic tea base with added ingredients that have not been certified organic, but do meet [our] strict standards. It should be noted that EEC standards are actually stricter
than USDA standards.”
That company is still somewhat unusual for having gone for the USDA Organic certification for some of their teas. Most likely because they do have U.S. operations, they decided it was worthwhile to get U.S. Certification for the most popular teas in the U.S. Many of the European-owned and Asian-owned tea gardens & processors, however, are certified organic to European and/or Asian standards, and since the bulk of their market is Europe and/or Asia, they don’t see the need to pay for USA organic certification. There may be debate about that assertion in the above quote, but most European and Asian entities do feel that their Organic Certification is more exacting than the USA’s, thus they don’t see the need to undergo the expense and procedure and time required to gain USDA NOP certification in addition to the certification they already have.
(We suspect that this attitude is in the process of changing as the U.S. market for quality loose tea grows and the average tea consumer in the U.S. is growing increasingly better-informed, but that’s just our opinion, and at the moment we have to deal with the prevailing state of affairs.)
Okay, that’s all well and good, but let’s get down to the impact of all of that on KTeas.
KTeas is private label, meaning we are our own brand. We made that choice because from the very beginning, we intended that one day we would be creating our own blends to sell. In fact, as referenced on our Facebook Page on New Year’s Day, we already have a “signature blend” that we cannot yet package and sell to you because the blend was created out of teas we bought retail before KTeas even existed, and we have not yet found just the right wholesale teas to use in re-creating our signature blend!
What’s more, even if we had found “the right teas”, we have not yet found a facility in which we could do the blending and packaging. It was recommended to us, because we are such a small business, that we locate a commercial kitchen, such as a caterer’s, which is not in use all of the time and whose owner would be willing to rent out the use of the kitchen during their own non-use hours. Because: one of our goals is to eventually work with local grocery stores and markets and restaurants who like to carry/use the products of local businesses, and such establishments must meet Health Dept. standards. Hence, we would need a Health-Dept.-approved facility in which to do the blending and the packaging of our products which would go to those establishments. However, though one might think in these economic times that catering businesses or restaurants or other enterprises with commercial-grade kitchens would be looking for an opportunity to bring in some extra money, we have not yet located such a facility of which we can rent the use.
What this has to do with the organic question is: Another reason we would need a commercial-grade kitchen is that when we do make our own blends, if we use organic ingredients and want to be able to label the resulting blends as “organic”, we would have to have a facility that has been Certified Organic. We’d probably have better luck with a commercial-grade kitchen that is already Health-Dept.-approved either turning out to also be certified organic or easily getting certified organic, than with our own kitchen, right?
Thus, as we researched tea wholesalers and found suppliers who do private label, whom we had determined we could trust as far as (a) the quality of their teas, (b) the fact that the workers on the plantations and in the factories are paid and treated fairly (Fair Trade, Direct Trade, Ethical Tea Partnership, etc.), and (c) the teas and tisanes they make available to us being as much as possible organic . . . we tried many of their teas and tisanes to determine which ones we wanted to carry our name, KTeas.
Then, we narrowed down the list to those suppliers who also offered the private label service whereby they package those teas and tisanes which we selected, and they put our private label on the packages for us, in their own facilities before shipping to us.
We thought this would enable those products which are organic to be labeled organic under our private label, since they would have been sealed up in an organic facility and the seal not broken once they reached us because they’re already in their resale packaging.
Not so. We have learned it’s a lot more complicated than that. At least if we want the trustworthiness of the USDA Organic seal of approval on the label.
While there are a lot of loopholes, for lack of a better word, concerning whether the word “organic” appears on the front of the label or only in the ingredients list, and based on percentages of a business’s product that is organic being below a certain % of that business’s total products, blah, blah, blah . . . if you want to have that USDA NOP stamp of approval on your product label in the United States so that people can look at your label and trust that your product is 100% organic (or whatever organic claim you are making), then you have to have passed inspections to be Certified Organic by a USDA-approved Certifying Agency and be able to pass annual renewals of certification.
We thought that by selecting teas from suppliers who are Certified plus receiving our private label teas in sealed packaging from those Certified facilities, we could then have Certified Organic KTeas teas. Not that cut-and-dried. At least as far as having the NOP certification appearing on the labels, one supplier has informed us that our private label KTeas labels must be approved by the same certifying agency that certified our supplier, even though the teas have already been certified before they’re packaged for us! Which, if you stop to think about it, is a good thing: remember the remarks earlier about the assurances that are supposed to be inherent in the stamp or seal seen on the label? Going through the approval process is no doubt to ensure that nothing broke the organic chain by the time the tea is sealed up in private label KTeas packaging.
We are paying the fees and going through the process of having the labels of those teas approved. In the meantime, there are teas that we are getting from that supplier that are organic but do not yet say organic on the label. (We had proceded to identify those teas as organic in the website listings, but it turns out that we were doing so prematurely. We are waffling on whether to remove the word “organic” until we have completed the approval process, or leave the word because we are going to have that approval, we just don’t know yet when the process will be completed and we’ll start getting those teas shipped to us with the certified-organic labels.) We do have a few teas from another supplier who does go ahead and put the word “organic” on our private label when the product is indeed organic, but you’ll notice those labels do not display USDA NOP seals.
So: be vigilant, to be sure---“caveat emptor”! But also be aware that the whole organic labeling practice is (relatively) new and complicated and the wrinkles are still being ironed out of it.
Try to get to know the sources of the organic products you’re looking at buying. Having some kind of relationship with them might be the best way of knowing what you’re getting, since the question is not entirely whether a product is organic or not, but sometimes the question is whether a product qualifies to be labeled organic even when it is organic. Perhaps if the products in question are not local and can’t be produced locally, “getting to know” the supplier might be more a case of doing your due diligence, researching the company. And hey, if it all makes your head hurt, how about enjoying a soothing cup of tea while you’re doing the research?
When it comes to produce and meat that is organic, if you have local farms and providers that you can literally, personally get to know, that may be the easiest way of determining the quality of what you’re getting. Perhaps you could literally build a relationship with those folks over a cup of tea!
And please do develop a relationship with KTeas. We at KTeas believe that Relationships are an integral part of what Tea is all about, and we want to share a cuppa with you, literally or figuratively, at the Intersection of Life and Tea.
(This blog entry was inspired when completing the questionnaire for the KTeas interview on Now Serving Tea.)
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