Category: Northern Tea Merchants News

There’s an emerging news story which we’d like to set the record straight for our readers this month….. The Suez Canal diversions…

There have been many headlines in both trade and domestic press relating to the Houthi attacks on container ships. After reading these headlines one could be forgiven for thinking that global trade was significantly under threat. The actual situation is quite different. Whilst the shipping lines are incurring much greater fuel, insurance and operational costs, and higher freight rates are being charged, these are nothing like the levels experienced during Covid, when shipping rates from Asia to Northern Europe went up by approximately 800%. Current rates are up approximately 200%.

There are reported fears of delayed vessels arriving at ports en masse which will lead to congestion, however the feedback from most European container ports is largely positive. Whilst any vessels that have diverted from the Red Sea around the Cape of Good Hope have experienced a two-week slide in final delivery date, this also means there is a fairly consistent schedule of ships arriving, albeit being 10-14 days late. This means a fairly low impact in port operations although some bunching of arrivals is expected towards the end of January.

The shipping lines are, in general, working directly with port operations to create plans to get their vessels through in good time. For Asia to Europe services, an 11-week sailing rotation has now become 13-15 weeks, however the shippers are mitigating some of this by introducing extra tonnage and calls at extra ports. Some Asia to Europe services have included Cape of Good Hope scheduling into their plans until April which shows they aren’t expecting to see an improvement on this situation in the short-term. The prediction is that vessels from Asia will be delayed for the near future and that cascading unloading shipping equipment shortages will produce increasing challenges at loading ports.

We have good stocks of both tea and coffee and don’t anticipate these delays to cause any problems with our ongoing supplies to you.

We are hugely looking forward to some coffee work that we are about to do with a group of Indian Coffee producers and a brand of coffee called Aane Kaapi. We have worked with the Thekaekara family since the late 1990s when we first started on a project called the ‘Just Change Network’.

Their eldest son, Tarsh, has founded a project whereby farmers and elephants can coexist and we have offered to roast and pack this coffee for the UK and donate 50% of the profits from this venture to their cause. We will likely receive 2 tonnes which we will be selling both online and to our many wholesale customers. We can use this 2 tonnes of coffee in about 6 weeks and we are hoping to be able to bring in larger amounts as time progresses. Find out more about the project here.

Unfortunately change doesn’t happen overnight, particularly when it comes to sustainability and going ‘green’ in business…but it’s a journey which is well under way.

In the tea and coffee industry, achieving true sustainability with packaging is a lot more than saying we have introduced plastic free tea bags. If only it were that simple (which it isn’t!) In fact it is something that has taken up a great deal of my time and thought, particularly over the last 12 months.

As part of my research, I have been drawing on expertise and advice from Chesterfield Borough Council and Derbyshire County Council, our various packaging manufacturers and Nottingham University (all of whom I wish to extend my thanks).

After extensive research, I have identified our first goal of becoming more sustainable starts with the packaging we use at Northern Tea Merchants; any potential replacements if necessary and to keep updated on the science that I need to make informed business decisions.

The first of these decisions was recyclable vs. biodegradable.

As a ‘rule of thumb’, oil-based plastics are not biodegradable, bioplastics are. A bioplastic is made using vegetable-based polymers, but these can cause issues with the longevity of the barrier it provides to its contents. To give you an example, the acidity of the Bergamot oil used to flavour Northern Tea Merchant’s Earl Grey Tea will slightly degrade bioplastic. This results in the packaging splitting or becoming weak. Not something that we want at all!

Also, Bioplastics do not perform as well when they are being printed/coloured and for the first time ever the food industry is having to deal with packaging that only has a slightly longer shelf-life than the food it is designed to contain.

Bioplastics also require specialist industrial composting as the temperatures achieved in a domestic compost heap are simply not high enough to start the biodegradation process. This means you must dispose of them using a supermarket waste recycling scheme (not your green bin at home).

During my research I was horrified to find out that if one were to put a compostable bioplastic bag into a domestic plastic recycling bin, this would severely contaminate the whole recyclable plastic waste stream for that bin. Another fact people are often surprised to learn is that any type of black ‘technically recyclable’ plastic cannot actually be recycled.

Despite this issue with plastic, we are making considerable progress on our journey to being a business with 100% sustainable packaging.

We have already made the switch on our tea bag paper and sealing tape and sourced alternatives for coffee bean and ground coffee packaging (that contains a gas equalising valve which must also be recyclable) so we can switch quickly to more sustainable packaging once existing stocks are used up.

We are also in the process of making other changes as you can see from the table below which shows where we are today with our packaging, broken down by product type:

Recycling information for Northern Tea Merchants products (Updated March 2023)

We will update the table as we change our remaining laminate packaging (namely our coffee pouches and leaf tea packaging). We have quite large stocks of leaf tea packaging that will likely last us some considerable time, but we have already decided what we will replace these with. One thing we will not do is to send them to landfill!

It seems that, on occasion, sustainability aspirations are further ahead than the actual science and physical logistics of recycling.  Finding a way forwards for a small business with a finite budget does not put us in a position to be innovators. To counter this, Northern Tea Merchants has embraced the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) guidelines as have many large organisations. WRAP is the national agreement from the recycling industry on what can and cannot be collected for recycling from householders and how those materials should be presented for collection.

To see how these guidelines are put into practice with suppliers, I have attached Tesco’s guidance to their suppliers in how to deal best with their packaging choices based on existing recycling infrastructure.

Find the TESCO Guidance here.

With all this to take on board, I believe the country’s journey towards 100% sustainability will take longer than many people, possibly including government, think.

Our first step is to recycle as much of our waste packaging as we can, until the science of packaging manufacture AND packaging disposal by biodegradation catches up. Waste sorting technology is also crucial to progress. There is plenty still to be done but we can all play our part.

Northern Tea Merchants is delighted to share the launch of a new click and collect service available on www.northern-tea.com.

This new service aims to not only enable you safer access to your essential tea and coffee during the pandemic but will also help you save time when collecting any future orders.

You can choose from all of the products listed on our website. Once a Click and Collect order is placed, goods will be ready to collect as early as the next day.

“We are confident that this investment in our website will allow an even more convenient and efficient way to shop with us,” James Pogson, Director said.

“The new Click and Collect service will limit the time customers spend in the shop as their order will be ready to collect upon arrival. We know this will give peace of mind to many of our customers during the pandemic.

“We pride ourselves on putting our customer care at the heart of what we do, so we are delighted to offer this service FREE of charge and with no minimum spend.”

Click and Collect orders can be place via our website, simply visit the website at www.northern-tea.com and at check-out, select the option to Click and Collect (full terms and conditions can be found here).

This new service is in addition to the local delivery option already in operation which serves customers living in Chesterfield and North East Derbyshire. To use our FREE delivery service simply telephone to place your order.

Coffee is the 2^nd most valuable export from developing countries and records describing its consumption date back as far as the 15^th century. Today it is a truly international product that is produced in massive volumes by literally millions of smallholders. Many of these smallholders produce less than 500 kilos of what is called ‘parchment’ (‘farm gate coffee’). This parchment needs to be cleaned, graded, and sorted before it is ready to be packed in its familiar sack and this grading and cleaning can reduce the original weight of 500 kilos by as much as a third. Therefore individual producers of coffee tend to work together in the form of a co-operative, where resources are shared and the collective group has a much louder ‘voice’ than any one individual. Certain areas within a coffee growing country will produce slightly different profile or flavour of coffee bean and there are likely to be several different sub-varietals of coffea arabica within these crops. Unless a grower specifically requests for their coffee to be milled separately the general practice for large amounts of ‘generic’ coffee is to mix everything together, giving consistency and homogeneity and also vast quantities.

Many of our customers, particularly those who are reselling coffee that we have sourced are requesting traceability on these types of coffees where the specific producers can be identified. With many generic coffees, this is almost impossible and on occasion it is even difficult to identify the individual cooperatives who have contributed. Amongst the paperwork that is usual issued is simply a proof of origin document which states all the coffee within a particularly batch has come from the country that grew it. We have been purchasing green coffee beans and roasting coffee since 1968 and so we have had 52 years experience and some excellent long standing relationships with many individuals, cooperatives and exporters. As a result our ‘little black book’ is extensive and so when we were set the ‘mission’ of finding traceable generic coffees, we took on the task with gusto.

My first port of call was our favourite importer (DR Wakefield) who were able to give the detail of who was the ‘right size’ and I received contacts, some of whom we were already in contact with whose origins included, Brazil, Ethiopia, Africa, Colombia and Sumatra – all of which produce vast amounts of generic coffee. Depending on which coffees my retail customers choose we will be offering some new coffees which we can trace directly to their specific producers and whilst these coffees will not be single-estate, we will know which small farms specifically contribute to the batches of coffee we purchase. We already have some fine examples of single estate coffees for example Daterra, Jamaican Blue Mountain, Costa Rica Las Palomas and Papua New Guinea Sigri, and these new traceable coffees will sit very well with and complement our existing high quality single estate offering.

Keep an eye out for these new offerings in the coming months.