Verdant Tea

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From convenient online ordering to ingredient sourcing and white label packaging, we want to partner with you to make your tea projects a success. We have years of experience in our industry, from importing tea by air and by ocean, to creating custom tea blends, formulating ready to drink beverages, and designing custom packaging for diverse brands.

Learn more about our unique services, and contact us to get started on your custom project!

 

 

Online Ordering

 

Our partners pride themselves on offering the freshest most direct tea on the market. Their collections are always being updated with brand new seasonal offerings, limited harvests and even new experimental kinds of tea. To make sure that you have access to every tea our partners choose to offer, we have done away with the clutter of catalogs and the confusion of phone and email ordering. You can now order directly from our site with your own login to see the lowest, most up-to-date pricing we can offer, and try as many teas from the collection as you are interested in.

Our new, complete online wholesale catalog provides a complete resource for your needs with steeping instructions, picking dates, farmer info, flavor notes and background on each tea. Why pick at random from a gigantic catalog with nothing to go off of but a name? See pictures of the tea and learn everything you want to know so that you can share that knowledge with your customers.

Questions? Don’t worry, we are always here to help.

Our partners may be across the ocean picking tea, but we are based in Minnesota and ready to answer your questions in your time zone. You can always call, email or chat with us to get answers to your pressing questions. Everyone on our team is passionate about tea and eager to help!

Once you have your teas picked out, you can download resources on each tea and farmer from our library to share with your team and your customers.
coming soon! ]

We know that running a business takes a lot, and we hope that online ordering makes things just a little easier for you! No more waiting for emails, no credit applications, no purchase orders, no searching through old catalogs and price lists – just good, simple online shopping with wholesale pricing, packaging, and shipping. You can even pay with a credit card so you don’t have to worry about checks, bills and terms.

 

Custom Sourcing

 

Looking for something a little different?

We work directly with our tea partners in China. Because we do not source from a catalog, you don’t have to either. Maybe you need to hit a certain price point, or maybe you are looking for a specific finishing style or cultivar. Our partners can help!

Below are some examples of custom work our partners can do. This list is by no means exhaustive.

If you are looking for something specific, get in touch now, and we’ll do our best to help in every way possible. Our partners ask for a 25 kilo combined minimum for any custom request to make it efficient to ship and package. Small custom orders can be sent via air freight for fast turnaround. Larger orders can be ocean freighted directly for the most cost effective solution, or held and combined with one of our other shipments depending on your timeline. Our partners capabilities vary, but many can handle large bulk requests, so get in touch, and we’ll walk you through the process.

 


The Zhenyuan Dongsa Cooperative in Yunnan hand picks from wild tea trees in the Mount Ailao National Forest Preserve, harvesting and finishing both traditional Camellia Sinensis Assamica, and the region’s wild Camellia Crassicolumna (yabao) trees.

The cooperative can pick from age-specific trees, harvest single tree lots, blend for specific flavor profiles and price points, and even do custom pu’er pressings in Dragon Pearls, 100g cakes, 250g Xiao Jin Gua, 250g bricks, traditional 357g cakes, and more. They can package in custom printed labels, which we can help you design or give you the specifications for your own designer. Sheng pu’er, shu Pu’er as well as several styles of black tea are available to work with. Get in touch for samples and more information.

 


Master Zhang in Daping, Anxi has one of the most biodiverse ecologically balanced plots in the area. His career has been in pioneering organic farming techniques and researching processing styles, both traditional and new.

Master Zhang has several dozen varietals in his fields, available at just about any price point. He can match roast style and finishing to spec, from rolled oolongs to strip oolongs to traditional semi-rolled style. If you are looking for oolong of any kind, for any project, Master Zhang can help. He can also package on site in 5g to 7g increments or ship in bulk.

 


The He Family in Laoshan are producing some of the most popular green and black teas we help import. Beyond the catalog of what they make available internationally, they are also producing many different grades and finishing styles of their Laoshan tea, from flat-pressed, to rolled to twisted bilochun style.

The He Family is also constantly experimenting with tea-style finishing for caffeine-free herbs like Gan Zao Ye, or even sweet potato leaf. Contact us to learn more!

 


The Li Family in Wuyishan have one of the best plots in the preserve, picking from well-established stock fed by sweet mountain spring water. They can match their finishing and firing style to any requirements, on any varietal.

With advance notice, they can even reserve and harvest their unparalleled Wild Tongmu Jin Jun Mei, or set aside Old Tree Shui Xian for further roasting and aging. For the highest-end, most valued teas, the Li Family is here to help. Li Xiangxi loves sharing her family’s  award winning collection as an act of cultural exchange and hopes her work can help you fall in love with Wuyishan.

 


Huang Ruiguang in Fenghuang cultivates and processes some of the rarest dancong in the area, now with the help of his sons. In recognition of his lifetime service to the region in improving agriculture, he has been given some of the highest elevation plots in Wudongshan, with access to some of the oldest trees in the region.

He is a published author a teacher, and a figure mentioned in every survey of the industry. He is happy in his semi-retirement to see the work he started in Fenghuang inspiring a culture of tea drinking across the world. While price prohibits many of his teas from staying in stock in our online wholesale catalog, all varietals and grades are available for special order. Get in touch, and we’ll let you know what he has available.

 


Xingyang Workshop in Yunnan produces a tremendous variety of blended pu’ers as well as pu’er pressed with flowers and fruits, or black tea and shu pu’er stuffed into mandarins.

While we hope to stock their full collection in our US warehouse soon, if you are interested in their beautifully clean fermentation, and expert blending and pressing work, get in touch with us. We’ll let you know what they have on offer!

 


Not seeing what you need? Don’t worry, we have many partners and friends across China, and we are always searching for new friends and partners each season. Send us an inquiry and we’ll get right on it. We’d love to be your logistics partner in building a better tea culture worldwide!

 

Ingredient Sourcing

 

If you are looking for tea to use in food and beverage manufacturing, perfumes or body products, we’d love to help. There are plenty of cheap bulk tea flavorings out there, but we believe the sustainable future of both tea sourcing and ingredient sourcing requires integrity and transparency. If you want to use ingredients whose stories can be one of your strongest marketing points, and whose flavors are so nuanced that they reduce your need for other ingredients, we want to work with you!

We have experience sourcing for RTD beverages like soda, kombucha and chai, perfumes, tea blenders, beer, liquor, and even ice cream. Tea has more volatile aromatic compounds than just about any other ingredient you could use, and therefore massive complexity. We’ve helped beverage manufacturers save money and win new business by cutting added sugar in their drinks because our partners’ teas is so naturally sweet.

Need help finding facilities to brew or extract for you?
We have the connections to refer you on to qualified facilities to help process our partners’ fine tea.

We know that food and beverage manufacturing is a tough business with small margins, and we are here to help. Our partners’ teas are hand picked and hand finished, so while it may not be the cheapest option on the market, it yields stronger, richer extraction per kilo, and the stories of each region and each farmer can help you carve out competitive shelf space in grocery aisles or the liquor store.

Learn about all of our partners and their remarkable teas, or get in touch now, and we can send you samples and more info. Our partners have the capacity to meet large orders or work with their neighbors to scale their supply with your business. We are a bonded licensed importer, and we can help you ship direct from China to save on freight.

To be able to offer effective pricing and shipping, our quotes for custom ingredient sourcing work best for projects looking for at least 500kg of tea at a time. If you are just getting started, or need less tea, get in touch, and tell us your immediate needs. We can often consolidate your shipment with another shipment of ours and forward it on to share our bulk shipping savings with you.

Do you own your own brewing facility, or are you looking to establish one? We have relationships with manufacturers of high quality ISO certified brewing equipment, bottling lines, and more. Get in touch, and we can help you look into pricing. Our clients see tremendous savings in sourcing their equipment from the Chinese manufacturer instead of a US retailer.

 

Tea Ware

 

Are you looking for teaware for cafe service or to sell retail? We have a wider group of connections across China to help source the perfect teaware for your needs. We are working on bringing in a full warehouse of in stock teaware items from our partners, but until then, we are happy to help bring in any special requests by air or ocean freight depending on your needs.

We are the official US distributor for Xiangfu, an affordable workshop that got started doing hand cut bamboo teaware and slowly expanded into modern elegant design and porcelain. For a complete Xiangfu catalog, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Xiangfu’s collection is perfect for teahouse and coffeeshop style service, with durable, washable pieces designed to make tea look and feel as special as it is.

If you are looking for hand-made gallery-quality pieces, we have great friends in Yixing producing beautiful, one-of-a-kind hand built teapots, as well as connections with workshops in Jingdezhen firing hand-made porcelain. Custom edition commissions can be arranged for volume orders.

We are also lucky enough to know Master Xiong and his son in law in Shui Ji who have revived the Lao Long Kiln to produce authentic wood-fired Song Dynasty quality Jian Zhan ceramics, as well as more affordable electric-fired pieces.

Whether you need tea boards, simple glasswares, gallery pieces, or a little of everything, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’d love to help! If you need advice on the best tea set up for your business, we are always excited to help advise on a brew and service workflow that makes sense.

Looking for smaller quantities than custom orders allow? Be sure to get a sign in for our site. We plan on adding in-stock tea ware of many basic items in the coming months, and we’ll let you know as soon as we do. These will ship straight from our US warehouse so that you can have what you need, shipped directly from the USA.

 

White Label Packaging

 

We are proud to be the first of our kind export-licensed private label packaging facility in Shandong province, and the first in China using true direct-sourced tea from small family tea farms. If you are interested in having your tea packaged in China while it is at its peak of freshness after harvest, we are here to help.

Our facility in Laoshan (near Qingdao, China) is equipped to package in 25g, 50g, 100g, and bulksized bags or tins according to your needs. By packaging in China, you can avoid the need for a packaging facility and food handling license in the United States. This can let you focus on building your customer base and finding the right market your products instead getting lost with changing food regulations.

You can supply us with any food-safe packaging direct from the manufacturer in China, saving on freight and avoiding US markups on empty bags.

Need help with your packaging design or printing? Learn more about our custom-printed tea packaging solutions below.

 

Custom Printed Packaging

 

Are you looking for high quality, food-safe tea packaging?
Don’t pay the huge US reseller markup on stock bags. Put your budget into the tea itself.

While many US resellers price 1 oz bags for bulk tea around 10-15 cents a piece (not to mention the sticker costs, which can be upwards of 10 cents), we can produce custom color-printed bags, glossy and matte, for pennies a unit. Imagine an extra 25 cents in your pocket or into your tea for every bag of tea you sell, without cutting corners or raising prices.

We can do full printed color bags, with or without gussets, resealable or non-resealable, foil lined and any size. Full custom work is available for runs as small as 50,000 bags.

If you have your own designer, we can work with you to provide specs for bag dimensions and print requirements. If not, we can provide design services in-house, based on your vision.

Looking for smaller runs? Don’t worry, you can always do a single bag style and use our custom small-run stickers for different types of tea. We can produce full color stickers for pennies compared to US sticker production. No matter the size of your project, get in touch, and we can think of a solution together. We’d love the chance to provide you with a quote, or send you samples of packaging work that we have done.

 

Special Events, Catering
& Corporate Gifts

 

We love putting together truly special and ethically-minded gifts for corporate and private clients.

A gift of tea is an invitation to learn about a region, a beverage, and the people who grow it. With on-staff designers, we can put together just the right materials for your gift packages, and help advise on tea selections based on region, farmer, or flavor pairings. We love complementing loose leaf tea gifts with brewing equipment for a full experience.

We still pack our orders one by one, so we have the capability to include your special messages, and the materials to make your friends, clients or partners happy. Not only can we arrange great gift programs, we can dropship to all of your recipients. Get in touch today and let us know what you are looking to do. We’d love to help. We’ve coordinated compelling shipments for as few as 40 recipients and as many as a thousand.

 

Consulting

 

We love helping businesses succeed, however we can.

We’ve been working with tea for over a decade now, deeply immersed in the business practices, law, and economics of the industry. While we are always happy to help you pick out the right selection, or work on custom sourcing with you, sometimes you might be looking for more devoted consulting work to establish a new program or best practices.

We have done consulting and education for corporate clients looking to improve the ethics of their supply chain, foodservice clients seeking ways to integrate tea into their workflow, or clients looking to use ethically sourced tea to realize greater profit and sustainability than their old model could achieve.

We’ve helped develop flavors and recipes for RTD beverages, and consulted on international import and export for these products.

At the end of the day, we think of ourselves as problem solvers. Our entire logistics chain and sales and design side is a solution for our business partners in China. If you’d like to find out if we would be a good fit to help you get started on the right foot or launch an all-new project, please get in touch.

If you are looking to get deeper into tea, we think we are stronger together. Take a look at our team bios [coming soon!] to learn more about the people behind what we do. We have deep experience in sourcing, education, business, design, and ecommerce and fulfillment, and over a decade of deep connections in China in tea, teaware, manufacturing and export.

 
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