The business of tea, read the way a market is read. Auction prices, harvests, trade, and the figures behind them, reported plainly and sourced to the record. We cover the trade, not the cup.
Kenya's tea farmers earned a cumulative $424 million at auction in the first half of 2026, and the Tea Board of Kenya's chief executive said the country's new export levy has had a negligible effect on price.
Read the Full Account →Twenty grams of Da Hong Pao sold for 208,000 yuan in 2005, ten times its 1998 auction price. The figures behind the record, and why they describe a museum piece, not a market.
Read it →Tea's auction price has gone nowhere for 20 years and now sits below what was paid a century ago, in real terms. Here is what the figures say is actually happening, and who is absorbing the squeeze.
A peer-reviewed synthesis of decades of research puts real numbers on climate change's effect on tea yield and quality, and on the growing area itself. Here is what the figures say, region by region.
A 2019 field study traced a kilogram of Assam tea through five pairs of hands and found the factory keeps the largest cut, ahead of the farm. A 2021 study of Vietnam's Thai Nguyen chain found close to the opposite. The arithmetic behind both.
Twenty grams of Da Hong Pao sold for 208,000 yuan in 2005, ten times its 1998 auction price. The figures behind the record, and why they describe a museum piece, not a market.
Fairtrade mandates a fixed 50 US cent per kilo premium on tea but only around 4 percent of eligible production is ever sold on those terms. Rainforest Alliance covers far more of the world's tea at a smaller, now-negotiable premium. Kenya's factories tried to opt out entirely in 2025. The figures behind all three.
Three producing countries pay tea labour on three different systems, a daily wage plus quota, a daily wage plus a government top-up, and a straight price per kilo. Here is what each one actually pays, and the one case where a wage rise cost more jobs than it raised.
Kenya, Sri Lanka, and India have each taxed a kilogram of tea leaving the country, at different rates, for different reasons, with different results. Here is what each levy actually does, and who really carries it.
Coffee has Nestle and JAB. Tea has no equivalent. Here is who actually moves the world's leaf, from a Kenyan cooperative managing 600,000 farmers to a private-equity-owned spinout carrying billions in debt, and why no one has consolidated the trade the way coffee's owners have.
Two Kenyan droughts, a dry Assam monsoon, and a Sri Lankan cyclone give four real, recent tests of what a weather shock does to the tea price. The answer is not the simple shortage story it looks like from outside.
A tea's grade, OP, BOP, PD, Dust, is a sorting code, not a quality score, and it is the single biggest reason two kilos of tea from the same garden sell for very different prices at auction.
Coffee has traded futures since 1882 and cocoa since the 1920s. Tea, which outsells them both, has never had one, anywhere. The reason is not price stability. It is that no two lots of tea are the same thing.
Irrigation, shade trees, and drought-tolerant cultivars all carry a real bill, and it lands on different people in India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka. Here is what the adaptation money actually buys, and who is short of it.