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Vancouver, B.C. based Tealeaves began as a small tea packer and retail shop in 1994. While many tea brands have grown retail or moved into mass–market sales over the last decade and a half, Tealeaves took a different route: tailoring its blends and products specifically for the luxury hotel and restaurant market.

Today, the company’s list of clients is packed with sterling hospitality brands, including Four Seasons, St. Regis, Mandarin Oriental and Grand Hyatt. The partnerships allow Tealeaves to put its product in front of quality–focused consumers, often in the comfort of their own $400–a–night hotel rooms — and company reps say many of those influential consumers have become regular Tealeaves customers.

Q: Did you aim to enter the hotel/restaurant segment when you first started the company?
Sutherland: No. We were convinced we would have dozens of tearooms throughout North America within a few years. But instead, fate intervened. Ruy Paes–Braga [of Four Seasons] discovered, taught, mentored and encouraged us to showcase our teablending skills in the hospitality space. I still remember the first time we tasted our teas with chefs and how they were so excited to taste very different tea palate profiles.
Chan: Paes–Braga is known as the godfather of Four Seasons. He was the first general manager of the first Four Seasons and trained something like half of all the other GMs across the world. He wandered into our tearoom one day and liked our tea recipes. He encouraged us to get into the wholesale business — starting with his hotel in Vancouver. He basically taught us the business, establishing the standards we still follow today. We owe a lot to Four Seasons for giving us our start.

Q: What did you learn from him that’s been so vital to working with Four Seasons and other luxury brands?
Sutherland: In addition to making the best teas, we learned our job requires us to have impeccable supply–chain logistics, quality assurance and quality–control standards. Making world–class tea is only one aspect.
Chan: At Four Seasons, you’ll never hear the door slam one room over and you’ll never hear the toilet run, and that’s because everyone in the company is so diligent about quality control. Paes–Braga taught us to look at the details no one else looks at. Supply chain logistics are essential. We’re obsessed with them. At the end of the day, if the guy who’s putting the product into the shipping box is kind of careless, that’s going to screw the whole system up. And if something does go wrong, how fast is the error fixed? That’s key to quality.

Q: Your products are available on your web site and then through your other luxury partners. Would it ever be possible for you to expand into something like grocery?
Chan: It’s hard because hotels can’t hide who their supplier is anymore. One well–regarded company’s VP of food and beverage told me: "Look, my guests walk into our restaurant, and they pay a lot of money. I don’t want them to blog that I’m serving a tea they can get at the corner grocer for $0.10 a bag." l think now a lot of our clients are worried about brand association.
Sutherland: End users can Google a brand on their iPhone and immediately understand (and calculate) what that serving of tea cost the hotel, restaurant or cafe. Tea is very visible in a hospitality setting — much more so than the brand of vinegar used in a salad.

Q: Are at–the–table Web searches really that big of a deal?
Chan: It’s changing the nature of the high–end market. The people everyone wants to go after are those who are 40 and under — they are the emerging consumers of luxury. They definitely feel like it’s OK to sit in a restaurant and Google everything. They’re much more discerning than the previous generation, much more knowledgeable because of smartphones and mobile Web. And they’re the ones who have the expense accounts and stay in the nice hotels.

Q: Your tea is available to hotel guests in their rooms in bag and sachet form. How do you ensure the product is going to be produced well in that very nontraditional tea setting?
Chan: The hot water situation in a lot of hotels is actually pretty good because we advise them to have electric kettles. They have automatic shutoff switches, which is much more important than people realize. A common error in tea infusion is the overboiling of water, which becomes flat (meaning lower dissolved oxygen) and the subtleties of the tea are lost. But even if the water temperature is not optimal, we can compensate by altering the blending composition. We basically try to bulletproof the product using different kinds of tea, whether it’s in a sachet or whole leaves.

Q: Do you actively go after new hotel accounts? What’s your strategy?
Sutherland: We do see significant referrals from our hotel clients, but we feel that the tea world is still very small (especially compared to the brand power of coffee companies), so the vast majority of our customers – whether hotels or end–consumers — find us by word–of–mouth. Many chefs have remarked that we are the "secret ingredient in the kitchen." Overall, we focus on our job, which is to make the best tea and offer all the logistics support that is required of an outstanding vendor. Our clients come to us looking for the best and we make sure we deliver exactly what they want, when they want it.

Q: What have you learned from working with so many world–class chefs?
Chan: A lot of them had a lot to do with how we built product. We are lucky to be interacting with highly palate–educated culinary professionals who are not in the tea world, which is great because they’re going to give us an objective opinion. Some teas have been made the same way for 50 or 100 years because that’s what the garden workflow has been for decades. But the truth is some of these teas just aren’t relevant anymore. A great example is gunpowder tea. We’re probably the only tea company in the world that doesn’t use gunpowder at all. It’s popular because it’s really cheap; you can buy it at auction or direct from a garden for way less than other unfermented teas, but it’s oily, tannic, and it’s not vegetal or fresh. We found that when we put a collection of green teas including a gunpowder in front of an expert taster like a chef or sommelier, that person will always taste that gunpowder and say, "Gross, what is that? Get it out of here."

Q: What’s the most important thing to keep in mind when approaching high–end restaurants and hotels?
Sutherland: The key point here is quality. It’s not enough to just be in front of luxury–focused consumers; you need to impress the aficionado and show him or her that this is the very best cup of tea or herbal they have ever savored. That comes from years of hard work and dedication. You can’t just slap a label on a tea bag and be "luxury" or "high quality."
Chan: Picture (celebrity chef) Gordon Ramsay. That’s the guy who is your client. Yeah, you have to be a little crazy to sell to him, but if you want to be the best, you've got to be able to sell to him and he’s got to be happy with what he gets. In the end, it’s probably easier to sell to McDonald’s or mass market. They want consistency and won’t scream at you every time something really small goes wrong.

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