Tea is too cheap.

We’ve been drinking tea for 300 years. A kilo of tea cost around £1,000 back then, now you can get a kilo for £2. 

Mad.

Hard work goes into growing, picking, processing, packing, branding and selling tea. But the rewards for doing each job are not equal. 

Most of the money is made in the UK. Too little is made where the tea is grown. 

70% of the world's tea is grown by smallholder farmers.

That's farmers with their own small tea fields.

And they mostly live in poverty. 

The cheaper tea gets here, the less money there is to go round. 

The focus goes on growing lots of tea cheaply. 

Instead of growing good tea. 

Or growing tea well. 

This means your morning cuppa tastes worse. You start to look elsewhere; coffee?

And the spiral continues.


Traditionally, tea brands buy teas from different countries and blend them all together.

They buy via various middlemen (auction, brokers, traders).

This long chain makes things murky, and almost impossible to see what the farmers at the end of the chain are being paid. 

That'd the bad bit done.


So, we thought… “Let’s start again”

Find a great tasting tea that really hits the spot.

Buy the tea direct, cut out middlemen. 

Talk to farmers; understand what they need. 

Pay the farmers more. 

Spill all the details.

For you, a better cuppa. For the farmer, a better price.

Lou can’t function until she’s had 2 cups of tea in the morning.

Two. Made and drunk at the same time. Before 8am.

Lou co-founded teapigs in 2006 and Sofia joined just after. We worked together to grow it into a much-loved brand.

Lou was a tea buyer and taster for Tetley before that so between us, we’ve worked in tea longer than we like to remember.

A lot has changed in tea since then.

We drink all different kinds of tea now - herbal, green, white.

But not a lot has changed in the tea we drink every day - our black tea, which goes by many names - ‘normal’, ‘english (breakfast)’, ‘builders’ etc.

It’s still the tea we drink the most, by a long way - 3 cups a day each.

But we don't give it much thought. And we've got used to it tasting "meh".

Meanwhile, we’ve thought about other things we use all the time and given them an upgrade - coffee (artisan), bread (sourdough) and beer (craft).

But if you’re going to do something 3 times a day, you should feel good about it.

So we’ve made an everyday tea that tastes like good tea should taste; fuller, bolder, brighter.

The kind of tea you'll want to drink everyday.

And it pays farmers more.

Here is SPILL. We hope you love it.