About Northern Tea Merchants

Northern Tea Merchants was established in 1959, although the Pogson family's connections with tea date back to 1926 when the present owner's father first entered the trade. From small beginnings, delivering tea door to door from an Austin 7 van, our business has expanded to manufacturing over 100 million cups of Tea and Coffee per year. We think this has been for the following reasons:

• We were amongst the first tea companies in the UK to manufacture tea bags.
• We have always applied the motto, 'Would I be happy with this tea or coffee?' to any products that we buy or manufacture.
• We have over 3000 satisfied catering customers, from small cafés and snack shops to some of the largest catering organisations and supermarkets in the UK
• Our Owner has given consultancies on tea and coffee to many businesses and has lectured at University level and been interviewed on television on this subject. Both the Owner and the Operations Manager have given talks to interested groups of people, radio interviews and have judged catering tea competitions on behalf of the UK Tea Council.
• We taste every blend of tea or coffee before it is sold.
• We have our own tea and coffee shop at our premises in Chesterfield that has been awarded the Tea Council's Award of Excellence. We have also come first in the competition category 'Access For All' that is run by Margaret Thornby's Tearoom Awards.
• We are constantly seeking interesting new additions to our range of teas and coffees and have enlisted the support of several well-respected international tea and coffee brokers to assist us in our searches.
• Some of our customers have been drinking our tea for over 60 years! (Supplied since the early 1940's by the present owner's father's tea company before it's amalgamation with Northern Tea Merchants in 1971 and still supplied by us today!)
• We have been involved in the Fairtrade marketplace since the early 1980's, and have assisted some of the movement's pioneers to improve their blends, packaging and product consistency.
• We are licensed Fairtrade importers and carry consistent, high quality stocks of Fairtrade Teas, Fairtrade Coffees and Fairtrade Cocoa.
• We have been roasting Organic Coffees for the last 14 years and have the Soil Association's UK5 processor licence AND the Organic Food Federation's UK4 processor licence.
• We are members of the Rainforest Alliance Sustainable Coffee Programme and stock several of their delicious gourmet coffees
• We have an audited quality manual and retain a respected consultant Environmental Health Officer. We also carry out a regular series of internal audits to ensure that our teas and coffees are manufactured and packed in a safe and hygienic manner.
• We have many experienced and long-serving members of staff who are experts in their own right on their particular aspect of packing or manufacturing.
• We are well respected by other companies within the Tea and Coffee trade.
• We are agents for several coffee machine, vending machine, water boiler and cappuccino machine manufacturers and will not stock any machine that has not proved to be reliable or is overpriced for its capabilities. This applies to both domestic and commercial models.