Category: Tea & Coffee News

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.

On the 2nd July 2020 we completed what is looking to be our final Biodegradable Tea Bag Paper test. The reason we suggest it is the ‘final’ test is because it has worked! The attached photos show a few of the tea bags we have made during this trial – if you compare them to the previous photos here – then you will clearly see that the new tea bag paper we have been sent by our supplier, Union Papertech, works very well and we have had no build up of the biodegradable glue that caused us such headaches in the last tests we did. Unless this paper proves to be unstable over prolonged periods of production, we will be offering a Biodegradable option for our tea bags. We have so far produced about 500,000 tea bags in this new material, and brew tests have also been positive, with the seals remaining strong during and after immersion in boiling water, and also after squeezing and compressing with a spoon whilst brewing.

The science behind our new Bio tea bag paper is the move from a non-recyclable hydrocarbon plastic based glue to a recyclable vegetable plastic based glue called PLA (Polylactic Acid), which is made from the starches found in corn. I’m also pleased to say that the materials used to make this PLA are non-GM, and that this is also certified independently by Eurofins laboratories.

The claims we can now make for this Tea Bag Paper are as follows:

1. It is a 100% biodegradable heat-sealable paper which is made using wood pulps and vegetable starch based bioplastic as a sealing polymer.
2. It is 100% biodegradable as it is made from biodegradable raw materials.
3. It is compostable to EN13432 standard (the EU standard for industrially compostable materials), it will disintegrate in home compost and the residual bioplastic will biodegrade in time.
4. The polymer used in this Biodegradable Tea Bag Paper is certified GM free by Eurofins.
5. The tests we have done show that this tea bag paper retains its strength well whilst in the cup, and will not affect the flavour of our delicious teas.
6. The paper is fully Halal and Kosher compliant, and will be added to our ethical certificates at the time of audit and renewal.

Although some environmental bodies define plastic as oil based, we are very wary of using the term ‘Plastic-free’ on our tea bags, as technically, the PLA used in this Bio Tea Bag Paper are still ‘bioplastics’, although derived from corn rather than from oil.

On another ‘Bio’ note, we have also just completed and dispatched our first order of fully recyclable outer bags to a customer in Wales, who supplies into the Public Sector. These bags will degrade naturally within 12 months of composting, and are now available to all customers who would like to purchase tea in 100% Bio bags. Again, we’d love to use the term ‘plastic free’, but are very wary of doing so, as these bags are (like our tea bag paper’s glue) made from bioplastics composed of fully recyclable raw plant materials. The cost of these bags is approximately 50% more than existing packaging, but we have been assured by our supplier that the price will reduce as popularity increases and demand rises. If you’d like a quotation on having tea packed into these 100% Biodegradable bags, then drop us a line and we’ll be pleased to discuss volumes and price on an individual basis.

We’re delighted to update you on the journey that Northern Tea Merchants is undertaking to increase its use of recycled packaging materials.

Recycling has become a much discussed topic here at Northern Tea Merchants (and indeed everywhere!) which has prompted us to look at how we can package our teas and coffees more sustainably without compromising on quality.

Quality has always been at the forefront of what we do with customers wanting our products to be packed in a way that keeps them fresh for 18 months. But the packaging we, and indeed the wider industry use to maintain long-term freshness is not environmentally friendly. The packaging involves the use of hydrocarbon based foils and laminates. These have come under immense scrutiny recently from the public in consumer nations such as ours, Europe and North America and demands are being placed on food producers around the world to make moves towards packing their foods in more environmentally responsible packaging.

After extensive research and product trials, we are getting closer to finding sustainable packaging solutions for our teas and coffees. Read on to discover more about James’ journey to discovering quality recyclable tea and coffee packaging:

Recyclable teabags

Teabag paper has been very much in the news in the UK, initially due to comments in a gardening magazine that related to the thin web of microplastic that is left when used teabags are placed in a composting bin. Huge public pressure is being placed on the UK tea trade in general to remove it from the packaging of our favourite beverage.

The science behind this is not straightforward and it has been some while after the initial outcry that usable products have started to appear in the teabag paper marketplace. Several large companies have been experimenting with various types of recyclable teabag paper for a while now and cleverly worded claims are already being made by some of the larger companies  as to the recyclability of their particular brand of teabags.

However, there have been problems. In their rush to be the first company to offer fully recyclable teabags, a couple of producers have come unstuck (quite literally) and have had problems with teabags splitting when immersed in hot water. You may have seen reports of this in the press. After lengthy discussions with our teabag paper manufacturer, we recently trialled our first roll of fully biodegradable teabag paper.

We made approximately 40,000 teabags from this roll and found that the new glue that has been applied to this teabag paper (in the form of Polylactic Acid which is derived from corn) causes residual build up on our heated rollers which in turn tears the seams of the teabags and causes potential splitting and bursting issues. We experimented with different temperatures and machine speeds but the build-up occurred even at the lowest temperature ranges we used.

About 30% of the resulting teabags produced looked like this, which we are not satisfied with and I am sure you would not be either.

We took this up with the manufacturer and were told that we weren’t the only ones to have suffered this problem and a new generation of teabag paper would be launched mid to late October. I immediately ordered a sample of the new paper to be delivered as soon as it becomes available and rest assured that as soon as it arrives it will be tested rigorously to ensure quality and the resulting teabags are fit for purpose. Watch this space!

Reducing plastic in coffee packaging

I received my first set of fully bio-degradable coffee packaging about a fortnight ago. Initial tests on these bags show that they provide a good seal, although the material is actually quite unappealing, doesn’t hold colour as well as the foil laminates we currently use and will also require different methods of sealing to that which we currently use. It is my intention to trial these recyclable options with our trade customers as a starting point after rigorous testing. Unfortunately, the cost of these bags is considerably more than their non-recyclable counterparts, with the implications of this meaning a price increase of approximately 40p per 250g bag of coffee.

I hope to see a growth in popularity in recyclable packaging and like everything as it becomes more popular the price will reduce and I look forward to updating you on our endeavours on this front as soon as there are further developments.

Special offer for our amazing NHS staff and all other key workers during these unprecedented times.

Free delivery is available until 30^th April 2020*, to all NHS and key worker staff within the delivery area covered by our van drivers who would usually have been delivering to 100s of cafes, restaurants and hotels etc.

The areas covered includes the Chesterfield Borough, Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Our drivers can leave your delivery, as instructed, in a safe place so that you can avoid contact with the driver to ensure social distancing.

To take advantage of this service you MUST call the shop on 01246 232 600 (Monday-Friday in office hours) to place your order and make payment over the telephone.

Obviously, our drivers can only deliver so far, however, if you live further afield we can still offer free delivery subject to a minimum order of £20. These orders will be delivered by usual courier service. Simply utilise the code: KEYWORKER20 via our website www.northern-tea.com.

* Terms & Conditions

• Subject to availability
• Details of key worker status will be required over the phone
• Orders must be placed over the phone on 01246 232 600 and no orders placed online will qualify for this free local delivery service
• 30th April end date may be extended

In July 2015 I was approached by someone I had known for many years in the tea trade, Mr Malcolm Ferris-Lay and he asked if I’d be interested in being involved with a group he was putting together which aimed to promote the history of tea in the City of London. He had already ‘recruited’ several other significant and long-serving members of the British Tea Trade, all of whom had worked in and around the various historic ‘tea sites’ in London during the heady days of the British tea trade from the 1950s onwards. The combined length of service of just four of these ‘tea people’ is 200 years!

An Association was formed, with a Board of Directors and I am very proud to be a member of that Board. We then collectively set about approaching the various UK tea companies and also the owners of the historic tea buildings and locations we wished to recognise for resourcing the project and also for permission to place the proposed plaques. One plaque has already been placed at St Katherine’s Dock with a further three planned at The Tea Building in Shoreditch, Sir John Lyon House in EC4 and Plantation House (now Plantation Place) on Fenchurch Street. Plantation House was in the 1950’s the second biggest office building in the City of London!

A tea walk around these sites in Central London is now being created where interested parties will be taken by an expert guide around the various tea locations for a small fee. We will publish details of this walk once finalised at a later date.

Take a look at the London Tea History Association’s website for more information here.