Tea- Blending and Trading

Blending

Tea blending is the process of combining different teas together to produce a final product. Blending is done to obtain better taste, higher price, or both, as a better tasting, more expensive tea can cover the inferior taste of cheaper varieties.

A tea blender/ tea taster has to ensure that his/her company blend meets all the criteria. A tea taster can sample between 200-1000 teas, adjusting his recipe to ensure that the companys brand remains constant. From the tasters findings, the different teas are taken and conveyed into a large blending drum. This rotates and mixes all the teas together.

When the blending is complete, the blend is ready to be packaged.

Trading

Tea is sold in a variety of ways. Tea may be sold at auction in countries of origin. There are international auction centres in Mombasa in Kenya, Colombo in Sri Lanka and Limbe in Malawi. India has auction centres in the north and south of the country. Indonesia sells tea in Jakarta. China sells tea by numbered standards at commodity fairs at Guangzhou.

Tea prices are governed by quality, supply and demand. Tea brokers act as intermediaries and taste, value and bid on their client's behalf. Tea may also be sold from the tea garden by private sale or at offshore auction whilst on route to its destination.[ http://www.tea.co.uk/tea-packaging-distribution-and-trading -2013]

Pckagig

For loose-leaf packets, the blended tea is put into a hopper which feeds a machine that carefully measures and dispenses the right amount of tea into the packet, filling it and sealing it, and weighing it as a final check. This is all done automatically in seconds.

Tea bag tea is fed into specially designed machines which will fill thousands of teabags, be they round, square or pyramid shaped, each minute. Each