As part of our underlying quality control and assurance program, organic raw materials (tea, spices, flowers, fruits) are integral to our goal of promoting environmentally friendly and sustainable agriculture.  Over the past two decades, our blending program has incorporated more organic materials as we work with organic gardens to improve quality and palate. 

Organic Certification is a process whereby as tea blender, we attest to:  avoidance of synthetic chemical inputs (example:  fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, additives, antibiotics); tea garden farmland that is free from synthetic chemicals for a set number of years; full audit trail of sale records; on-site inspections of farms for compliance to organic standards and physical separation between conventional and organic products.

Organic status varies from country to country (generally, European Union Eco-regulation and Japan JAS have stricter standards).  Legal regulations only set a minimum standard for food safety - as such, our company follows the strict standards of interpreting Organic status. 

One of the issues with organic certification is that ancient tea gardens are not as interested in having certification (partly due to avoidance of extra costs).  Tea gardens that grow the finest, high-quality teas sell out their entire harvest (at prices set by the grower since demand is high and supply is low).  So, unlike other tea gardens that rely on the use of ‘organic’ to market and sell production, there is no such need of marketing for the high quality tea gardens.  If these tea gardens employ chemicals – yield and quality will eventually suffer in the years subsequent to such use.  So, it is often counter-productive for these gardens to use modern methods of farming (that embrace higher yields at the expense of quality or concentration of flavor).  If we take the example of high-elevation, mountainous tea gardens:  the entire goal is to concentrate flavor in the leaves and to have slow growth.  The heavy use of herbicides, pesticides and chemical fertilizers would be inconsistent with this underlying philosophy.