Verdant Tea

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8 Partners, 6 Regions, 1 Supply Chain

Your industry-leading source for truly hand picked teas with 100% transparency. 

Real Partnerships, Real People

We are not a brand. We are a dedicated logistics solutions for our tea partners in China, small family tea farmers who choose to sell their fine handcrafted teas through our logistics network. Our tea partners are our oldest friends. Our relationships go back over a decade, growing up together, brainstorming together and growing the market for fine teas together. We stand against the idea of “sourcing trips,” whirlwind tours with posed photo ops. True partnerships built on real trust are the only way to get access to truly fine tea.

We believe in sharing not only the region, but the picking date, varieties, elevation, and most importantly, the farmer who grows each tea. Real connections with suppliers yield real conversations with customers. Our collaborations have helped establish cooperatives and invest in equipment in Laoshan, support schools for tea ceremony in Wuyishan, invest in new processing styles in Anxi, and build roads in Qianjiazhai. We want to end the world of brokers, auction houses, misinformation, hidden sources and fakery and replace it with a model where everyone wins.

When you work with us, you work with the farmer. This is sourcing for the modern world- true accountability, true transparency, and lifelong relationships.


Solution Oriented Service

If you are committed to bringing better tea to the world, we are committed to helping you. Our relationships with farmers and presence in China mean that we can help with anything from simple online orders to big custom projects.

Online ordering

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 connect with us to get answers to your pressing questions. Everyone on our team is passionate about tea and eager to help!

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.

Looking for easy ordering, and lots of info on teas and farmers? Learn more>>

Custom Sourcing

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!

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.

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 sodakombucha and chaiperfumestea blendersbeerliquor, 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.

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. 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.

White Label / Custom 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 bulk–sized 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? 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, Corporate Gifts and More

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

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 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 drop–ship to all of your recipients

Learn more about our Corporate Gifting options + large group / special event orders and let us know what you are looking to do.

partners regions supply chain

Your industry-leading source for truly hand picked
teas with 100% transparency.

 

Get an account today, and shop online!

Our Commitments

 

Truly Sustainable Farming

 

Our tea partners in China practice beyond organic farming, whether wild-foraging in some of the most remote tea mountains in the world, growing rows of soybeans to distract insects and replenish nitrates, or by leaving enough natural forest to encourage birds and other biodiversity for healthy tea plants. Their passionate work in agriculture is meant to safeguard their family land for their children and beyond, providing a living that makes tea possible as a way of life.

Beyond fair-trade, beyond organic: this is about true multi-generational sustainability for the growers and their land.

 

 

Real Partnerships, Real People

 

 

 

We are not a brand, we are a dedicated logistics solutions for our tea partners in China, small family tea farmers who choose to sell their fine handcrafted teas through our logistics network. Our tea partners are our oldest friends. Our relationships go back over a decade, growing up together, brainstorming together and growing the market for fine teas together. We stand against the idea of “sourcing trips,” whirlwind tours with posed photo ops. True partnerships built on real trust are the only way to get access to truly fine tea.

We believe in sharing not only the region, but the picking date, varieties, elevation, and most importantly, the farmer who grows each tea. Real connections with suppliers yield real conversations with customers. Our collaborations have helped establish cooperatives and invest in equipment in Laoshan, support schools for tea ceremony in Wuyishan, invest in new processing styles in Anxi, and build roads in Qianjiazhai. We want to end the world of brokers, auction houses, misinformation, hidden sources and fakery and replace it with a model where everyone wins.

When you work with us, you work with the farmer. This is sourcing for the modern world- true accountability, true transparency, and lifelong relationships.

 

Solution Oriented Service

 

If you are committed to bringing better tea to the world we are committed to helping you. Our relationships with farmers and presence in China mean that we can help with anything from simple online orders to big custom projects.

Online ordering
Looking for easy ordering, and lots of info on teas and farmers? Learn more>>

Custom Sourcing
Our tea partners have diverse capabilities.
Learn about direct custom sourcing >>

White Label / Custom Packaging
Want tea packed with your own label? We have facilities right in China for white label projects>>

Ocean and Air Direct Import
Importing direct from small family farmers is challenging work. Let us help cut the red tape>>

Food & Beverage Development and Sourcing
Source the most flavorful teas with the best yields for your product. Let us help find what you need>>

Drop Shipping
We can ship direct to your customers from China or the USA. Learn about drop shipping options>>

 

Meet Our Partners

 

the He Family
Laoshan Village, Shandong

green, black, oolong, and herbal tea

Pioneers and community leaders in Laoshan Village, the He family was one of the first to plant tea on the misty ocean-facing slopes of the Taoist Holy Mountain they call home.

We are proud to share the He Family’s tea every season, and we are dedicated to spreading appreciation for their craft while sharing their unique and innovative teas with the rest of the world.

Huang Rui Guang
Wudongshan, Guangdong

oolong tea and black tea

An accomplished technical master of tea, Huang Rui Guang is affectionately called a ‘modern tea sage’ by many because of his lifetime of cultivation in the skills of planting, processing and tasting tea.

In 2012, he was conferred the title of a recognized Cultural Treasure by the city government of Chaozhou. Today, he is working to pass on his lifetime of experience to his two sons Wei Ming and Zhen Ming.

 

Mrs. Li
Dragonwell Village, Zhejiang

green tea

Mrs. Li has been growing Longjing Village’s famous Shi Feng (Lion’s Peak) Dragonwell green tea her entire life. She began learning from her father, one of Dragonwell’s preeminent tasters and graders, as soon as she was old enough to talk.

Despite her family’s pedigree, Mrs. Li is still one of the most warm and welcoming people that you will ever meet. We are honored for the opportunity to share Mrs. Li’s fine tea on her behalf each year.

Master Zhang
Daping Village, Anxi

oolong tea

Master Zhang’s thousand-meter-high terraced peaks above Daping in Anxi, Fujian are a beautiful sight. He practices traditional organic farming, and his biodiverse fields place Daping’s native Mao Xie cultivar alongside Anxi’s famous Tieguanyin and unusual cultivars like Ben Shan, Rou Gui, Cai Cong, and more.

His recognized dedication to collaboration, awards for transparancy, and constant innovation ad experimentation are an example to generations of tea farmers, new and old.

 

Li Xiangxi
Tongmu & Wuyishan, Fujian

oolong tea and black tea

Li Xiangxi’s family works together in Tongmu and Wuyishan, applying their incredible skill at roasting to their spring-fed high mountain tea. Their proceeds go to teaching Daoist tea ceremony at Li Xiangxi’s school and working to preserve the wild tea bushes on the mountains above their family home in Tongmu.

Their conservation work has created a biodiverse tea garden that preserves the original habitat of the region for wildlife as a natural control for insects. The result is rich, complex tea that has won them gold medals across China.

Zhenyuan Dongsa
Farmers’ Cooperative
Qianjiazhai, Mt. Ailao, Yunnan

pu’er, black tea and herbal tea

The Zhenyuan Dongsa Farmers’ Cooperative brings together several families and craftsman across the stretches of wild tea forest in the Qianjiazhai region of Mt. Ailo National Forest Preserve.

Members of the cooperative work together to preserve the region’s old tea trees (alongside native wild near-relatives like Camellia Crassicolumna) and to share knowledge and techniques. The cooperative’s hand-picked and wild-foraged tea capture the essence of Qianjiazhai’s unique terroir.

 

the Liu Family
Longjuan, Anxi, Fujian

oolong tea and black tea

In Longjuan, Anxi, tradition and market pressures don’t drive the Liu Family to focus exclusively on traditional techniques; instead, they explore unexpected styles, mixing techniques and taking inspiration from across China to build a demand for their craft.

Their Longjuan teas blend tradition and new techniques for exciting hybrids that blend traditional Anxi cultivars with black tea and oolong techniques from Wuyishan and a growing collection of pressed, aged Longjuan Oolong teas.

Wang Yanxin
Qingdao, Shandong

white tea, black tea, and pu’er

Wang Yanxin is a fierce advocate for small farming, working with partner farmers from Yunnan to Shandong to develop entirely new kinds of tea and bring teas to a wider market. She specialises in Yunnan pu’er and dian hong, but has recently begun passionately exploring modern black teas in recent years by developing the boundary-crossing black tea: Yu Lu Yan Cha.

Her intense honesty and strong opinions make her a true force in Qingdao’s tea markets. Her memory for a tea’s taste, texture and aroma is legendary.

 

Let our Tea Partners introduce themselves to you.
Try their tea, free of charge, and get started!

 

 

 
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