Author: Dan Bolton

Author: Dan Bolton

West Bengal Tea Planters Appeal to Workers to Accept Wage Compromise
August 13, 2018 News Dan Bolton

WEST BENGAL, India Tea workers in India A three-day strike last week by more than 400,000 tea workers from Darjeeling to the Dooars and Terai tea growing regions halted production at hundreds of tea gardens leading to a loss in volume and quality according to planters. The region is “in no position to bear any

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DAVIDsTEA Investment Partners Sue to Remove Executive Chairman
August 13, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Shares of DAVIDsTEA fell to a 12-month low of $2.30 last week following a proxy fight, board resignations and a shareholder’s lawsuit seeking to remove co-founder Herschel Segal as executive chair. The company operates 240 tea shops in the U.S. and Canada. Shares were $30 when the company went public in 2015 and were trading

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Local Governments in Kenya Seek to Repossess Tea Lands from Multinationals
August 7, 2018 News Dan Bolton

With a high altitude and virtually daily rains, Kericho is the centre of Kenya’s large tea industry. Some of the largest tea companies including Unilever Kenya (here on the photo), James Finlay and Williamson tea are based here. Photo: GettyImages.com As the expiry date nears on 99-year tea estate leases, local counties in Kenya are

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Kenya Court Halts Unilever Voluntary Retirement Program
August 6, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Workers harvest tea in Kenya. Photo: GettyImages.com Kenya is experiencing a tense transition as owners of colonial-era tea plantations abandon tightly held vertical supply chains in favor of less expensive and more agile options for sourcing and processing tea. Unilever’s Kericho tea operations, which date to 1924, include 20 estates spanning 21,500 acres (8,700 hectares)

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What Defines Specialty Tea?
July 31, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Jasmine Pearl Pioneer specialty coffee trader Erna Knutsen, who passed away this summer at 96, was among the first green coffee buyers to champion the skills of coffee growers and to recognize the taste benefits of quality processing techniques. In her catalog of offerings Knutsen described characteristics inherent in terroir and priced them into transactions.

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Charleston Tea Plantation Co-founder Dies
July 31, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Mack Fleming In 1987 when Thomas J. Lipton Co., decided to divest its only U.S. tea farm on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina, horticulturalist Mack James Fleming and tea broker Bill Hall purchased the property, saving for posterity the Charleston Tea Plantation and the American Classic tea brand. Fleming, 75, died last week at his home

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Crowd Funders Reward Cold-brew Tea and Alcohol Infusion with $250k Investment
July 23, 2018 News Dan Bolton

  Infusing tea and alcohol dates to the 1700s with the Hot Toddy (first known as hot whiskey) appearing in 1786 and with green tea punches popular since colonial times in the Americas. Last year, Newcastle blender Tea Venture Ltd., introduced Noveltea, an alcohol-based cold-brew tea that continues the British tradition. The company is one

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Interim Wage Hike Quiets Assam but Darjeeling Remains Unsettled
July 9, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Assam tea workers The government of Assam just awarded tea workers wage increases of INRs30 ($0.45) per day through 2019 as an interim step in the ongoing negotiations to achieve wage parity in the Brahmaputra and Barak River valleys. Meanwhile in West Bengal tensions are rising with the announcement of a three-day strike late this

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Black Tea Earns Endorsement from European Food Safety Authority
July 9, 2018 News Dan Bolton

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has awarded a positive opinion on its heath claim that black tea improves people’s attention span. The EFSA is a first involving tea. The head of Unilever R&D and lead scientist, Dr. Amelia Jarman said the claim is based on company research involving human trials. Unilever conducted three human

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American Specialty Tea Alliance is Open for Business
July 2, 2018 News Dan Bolton

Tony Gebley The American Specialty Tea Alliance () is a newly registered non-profit founded to champion the tea industry’s small business segment. Its mission “is to grow interest in specialty tea, in both the tea industry and the public, through education and community, by facilitating collaboration between our members, by bolstering the quality and tenability

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