Brew News - the Yorkshire Tea blog

As it’s Follow The Frog week, we thought it would be a great time to focus on some of the work we’ve been doing with the Rainforest Alliance. And as luck would have it, our MD Andy has just returned from visiting our projects in Rwanda – a country which produces some of the finest teas in the world and that form a key part of our Yorkshire Gold and Yorkshire Tea blends. We asked him how his trip went:

“I’ve been to tea producing countries before, but never to Rwanda. To me the country had a feeling of fragility and hope about it – hardly surprising following the terrible genocide eighteen years ago. What really struck me was the youth and optimism of the people, whether it was those in positions of authority or the thousands of children I saw walking along the roadsides.

There is just no substitute for seeing it first hand. I hadn’t fully appreciated the impact that a company like Taylors has made in rebuilding the tea industry here.  The volume of Rwandan tea that we now import is five times that of four years ago as we have worked with farmers and producers to enhance quality and gain Rainforest Alliance certification.

I saw many of the social and environmental improvements made in the tea growing areas, improving the lives of growers and their families. My overriding memory is of the pride on the faces of a group of young people I visited at a vocational training centre near Kitabi estate as they put their new found tailoring and carpentry skills to use. It was humbling to see what a difference our work has made – benefiting everyone from the grower in the Rwandan hills to our loyal drinkers of Yorkshire Tea here in the UK.”

We’ve already discussed how Project Rwanda is making a difference to the quality of life for 10,000 smallholder farmers and is also improving the quality of our luxury Yorkshire Gold blend. This week, we’d like to explain a little about Rainforest Alliance who we work closely with.

You may have noticed the Rainforest Alliance logo on boxes of Yorkshire Gold. Well, the Rainforest Alliance is an independent body that is dedicated to helping people and the environment prosper. By being Rainforest Alliance certified, farmers not only work in a more environmentally and socially conscious way, they are also helped to improve the quality and quantity of the tea they produce, resulting in better prices and more tea to sell.

A big factor in achieving this is education. The Rainforest Alliance works directly with Rwandan tea growers to train them and their workers in better agricultural practices that minimize the effect tea growing has on the land. The farming communities are also supported in developing improved sanitation, health care, schooling, and housing which all help to improve the wellbeing of the farmers we buy from.

Some of the Rainforest Alliances’ key principles involve instilling relatively simple practical steps that tea farmers and workers can adapt to their own needs. These include better waste and water management, soil conservation, tree planting and the use of personal protective equipment.

Let’s take waste management. Tea production can produce waste water that is often, once used, left to stream straight back into rivers. By using a natural water filtration system, consisting of tiered beds of plants, the water is cleaned naturally and allowed to flow safely into the local water supply; proper composting provides a rich and free fertilizer that can be put back on the crop; organic waste can be used to produce natural biogas and recyclable waste can be separated and often sold.

Soil conservation is vital to allow the long term prosperity of a tea farm, not to mention the food security of local communities. In Rwanda’s tropical climate, heavy rainfall can easily wash away this vital commodity if measures are not taken to retain it. Composting, planting, and control of water run-off are all skills that Rainforest Alliance farmers take on board and which make a huge difference.

Finally, as their name suggests, the Rainforest Alliance has a particular soft spot for trees! Indigenous species are planted on certified tea estates across the tea-producing world. In Rwanda there are now a significant number of seedling nurseries established purely to supply tea farmers with hardwood varieties native to their country so they can help to preserve natural woodlands.

So all these steps not only reduce harm they also help make more money for the tea growers. Oh, and we get even better quality tea for our luxury Yorkshire Gold blend.

Over 75% of the tea that goes into our Yorkshire Gold and Yorkshire Tea blends currently comes from Rainforest Alliance certified tea estates and gardens. We’re gradually increasing these percentages and by 2014, we aim to have 100% of the tea in our tea bags supplied by Rainforest Alliance certified growers.

It’s possible, it’s worth it and it’s our commitment to improving the lives of tea growers, workers and their families worldwide. It’s working too – as 10,000 Rwandan smallholders will testify.

Last week, we introduced you to Project Rwanda and how it is making a difference in a country that’s suffered serious hardship in recent times. This week, we’d like to focus on how this co-funded initiative is improving quality – not just the quality of the tea itself but also the quality of life of thousands of farmers and their families.

Yorkshire Gold is a rich, full-bodied and refreshing golden brew that unites teas from the world’s very finest tea gardens and brings their wonderfully unique flavours together in your cup. Whilst the smooth malty flavours come from Assam second flush teas, Rwandan teas are responsible for the fresh and lively dimension to the taste. So the quality of Rwandan tea is very important to us.

Rwanda is known as the land of a thousand hills and it’s the combination of volcanic soils and high altitudes that makes the tea bushes that grow on these dramatic escarpments, which are often shrouded in cloud, so lush and verdant. In fact, so impressed are we with the quality of the tea produced here, we even offer a special ‘Yorkshire Gold Season’s Pick’ Rwandan tea, which is available for a limited period from late January each year.

To encourage and help growers in Rwanda to keep improving and producing the quality of the tea that’s an essential part of Yorkshire Gold, we need to all do everything better. We play our part by paying better, fairer prices for their tea crops. Rather than simply handing over funds, our experience tells us that it is better to improve through trade, not aid.

By matching a grant from the Department for International Development (DfID), we have co-funded a project to support 10,000 small-scale Rwandan tea farmers. The project helps them increase the processing standards and consequently the quality of tea has been raised too. Also, by partnering with the Rainforest Alliance we are working to help raise the standard of social, working and environmental practices so that Rwandan farmers can enjoy a better standard of living and quality of life.

Our tea buyers travel the world in search of the finest teas, and the very best quality leaves are what go into Yorkshire Gold. Maybe you’ve already tried it? If so, you’ll know it’s a wonderfully rich and luxurious cup of tea. To make it, we blend smooth and malty second flush Assam teas from India with fresh and lively leaves from the highlands of East Africa – especially Rwanda.

As a country, Rwanda has suffered serious hardships, none greater than the civil war in 1994. Since then, the tea industry has played a key role in the transformation of Rwanda and the welfare of its people.

We’ve been buying tea from Rwanda for over 37 years and for the last 3 years, we’ve been co-funding a UK government supported project that’s making a big difference to the lives of more than 10,000 tea farmers and their families. We call it Project Rwanda, and it’s something very important to us that we’d like to focus on over the next month. Play our video to discover more.

Our key aim is to help farms achieve Rainforest Alliance certification. To be certified, farms have to be well managed and practice more sustainable methods such as investing in new better waste water management.

What’s the incentive for them to do this? Well, being a Rainforest Alliance certified farm can be a really effective way to also increase yields, give farmers better prices for their harvests and improve workers’ living standards.

We benefit too, of course – by getting some great tea to help ensure you get a seriously good brew. We hope you’ll agree that it’s worth paying that little bit extra for. In our next blog, we’ll be looking in more detail at how Rainforest Alliance certification is improving quality.

Meet Simon Hotchkin. He’s our new Sustainability Manager. To be honest, Simon’s job title should really be Head of Properness. His role, at the heart of our Commodities Team, is to ensure that we not only continue to be fair to our suppliers and kind to the environment, but also find ways we can improve further still, right across the business.

So who is Simon? Well, he’s a family man and Yorkshire through and through. Born in sunny Scarborough on the North Yorkshire coast, Simon spent most of his childhood around Beverley and now lives in Wetherby, just down the road from Harrogate. Simon met his wife at University and has three cracking kids.

After a brief stint buying heart valves and pacemakers for the NHS, Simon got a taste for purchasing of a different kind and trained to be a tea and coffee buyer at another UK tea and coffee importer. In his 14 years there, he spent time in operations, manufacturing and new product design before finally spending his last four years there dedicated to sustainability.

Simon is a bit of a catch for us as he’s managed to amass experience right across the business of tea and coffee importing and blending. That’s unusual, but Simon is rather unusual. For example, he’s a bit of an iron man as he swam for Yorkshire, last year started open water swimming (he’s entered the Great North Swim in Windermere this year) and is a keen road and mountain biker. He’s into rubber too and is the only person we know who was in a team that space-hoppered the entire Pennine Way… all 260-odd miles of it. On reflection, unusual might not be the right word to describe him. So what is Simon looking forward to in his new job?

“I’m really proud to be working for the premier Yorkshire brand. It’s all about quality here. My main challenge is to not only carry on with the ethical work Taylors already does, such as developing sustainable sourcing policies with our suppliers, but also to balance that with social and environmental responsibility right through the supply chain. Sustainability through everything we do.”

Simon also mentioned that his other challenge is to not put weight on, as there are some rather tempting and sticky accompaniments to his mug of Yorkshire Tea in the staff canteen at the factory. The cycling and swimming should offset that.

Whilst not exactly offsetting, Simon adds “Here in Harrogate, we already make big efforts to reduce the amount of packaging, our carbon footprint and energy consumption. I’m going to look at every aspect of what we do to see if I can reduce it still further.”

But it’s not all about reducing our impact here, tremendous care and effort goes into ensuring we trade fairly and respectfully with our growers abroad and pay them fair prices. That’s why it’s essential that our buyers, and Simon, travel the world meeting growers at their tea gardens to get a better understanding of their tea, forge meaningful, sustainable long-term partnerships and also secure the best quality tea for our blends. By also having strong partnerships with independent certification schemes such as the Rainforest Alliance, we can quickly help make a real difference to growers and their communities. In fact, we aim to help 100% of our suppliers become Rainforest Alliance certified by 2014.

We’ll let Simon have the final say: “I’m really excited about meeting our growers. I’m fairly well travelled in Africa, India and Sri Lanka, so I’m looking forward to discovering China and South America. In particular, I’m looking forward to launching a couple of exciting new projects which hopefully will be as effective as the one with our Rwanda tea producers which helped improve the lives of 10,000 small-scale farmers and their families.”

At that point we had to cut Simon off and swear him to secrecy, but we’ll be announcing details of our new projects soon. Good luck in your new job Simon – we’re really looking forward to you making a difference. If you’d like to give Simon a good luck message, feel free to leave one below.

So the first Rainforest Alliance week may be at an end, but the hard work and the partnerships it has celebrated carry on. With that in mind, we wanted to share our plans for the future with you. Working with the Rainforest Alliance is about more than putting a frog on your box – it’s carries with it a promise, a commitment to achieving full certification.

In the coming months, over 50% of the teas that go into our Yorkshire Tea and Yorkshire Tea for Hard Water tea bags will come from Rainforest Alliance certified tea estates and gardens. You’ll see this change on our packs early next year.

Our luxury blend Yorkshire Gold will soon be at the 30% mark, thanks to a great deal of work with our suppliers for this blend, who make up some of the best tea producers in the world.

We’re committed to maintaining the relationships we’ve built up over the years with our key producers so we’re working together, gradually increasing those percentages. By 2014, 100% of the tea in our tea bags will come from Rainforest Alliance certified tea estates and gardens.

Thanks to all our loyal customers for your continued support – and look out for more news on our progress!

We’ve been working with many of our supplier for decades, and in some cases generations, so it didn’t feel right that we’d leave them behind as we moved towards all our teas coming from independently certified farms. The Rainforest Alliance model gave us the flexibility we needed to bring our most trusted suppliers with us.

A great example of this is Doomur Dullung, one of the oldest and best tea producers in Assam. Our relationship with this estate goes back longer than Yorkshire Tea itself so it meant a great deal to us when we got them on-board – some tea producers in India are choosing to stop dealing with Europe and its complex and demanding standards, and focus instead on the fast-growing internal market where doing business is far easier.

Not so for Doomur. The relationship we’ve built with them is very strong thanks to our shared values, and frequent trips to meet them out there in person. So when we started talking to them about working towards Rainforest Alliance certification in 2009, they were quick to respond.

Our Head of Tea Ian visited Doomur with representatives from Rainforest Alliance to talk through the key principles and the various standards that would need to be met across the board. Because of the work done together over the years, a great deal of the methods and practices were already up to scratch, but this pilot visit helped to identify other ways to improve too – carrying out a training programme to ensure all staff understood the importance of recycling and waste management, and the correct use of fertilisers and agrochemicals. There were also wider environmental points to look into, such as tree planting programmes, and waste water filtering initiatives to protect the local ecosystems.

Throughout the process we were delighted with the positive attitude of our partners at Doomur, and with the support provided by the Rainforest Alliance.

As luck would have it, SK Mitra from Doomur came to visit us this week so we got a chance to ask him for his perspective on working with the Rainforest Alliance. He told us: “The move to Rainforest Alliance all began when Ian [Taylors' Head of Tea] came to us about it. Much of what we did already – such as our mother’s clubs – put us in a very good position, but everyone at Doomur Dullung saw the benefits of going further straight away, and we quickly went from committing to work on four of our gardens to another five. Internally there was a lot of excitement about it, and it was very satisfying when we received official notification that we’d achieved certification earlier this summer.”

Regular readers of our blog may remember that last week we awarded our first ever Supplier of the Year trophy to Kionyo, one of our key Kenyan suppliers. It was a great chance to show them our appreciation – not just for the quality of their tea and their commitment to achieving such high standards, but for their ongoing efforts working towards achieving independent certification from the Rainforest Alliance.

Right from the start, George and the rest of the team at Kionyo have shown real determination to bring all their farmers on the journey to certification. The same is true of Imenti, another key supplier for top quality Kenyan tea.

Our Head of Tea Ian explains: “Imenti and Kionyo process the tea picked by around 13,000 smallholder farmers around the Mount Kenya region in central Kenya, producing some of the country’s finest teas.

We helped to fund the training of all the smallholder farmers who supply teas to these factories. It started with around 50 ‘Lead Farmers’ being trained by Rainforest Alliance. These 50 then travelled around the area to explain the Sustainable Agricultural Standard to all 13,000 of their fellow farmers, covering off the safe use of fertilisers, re-cycling, tree planting, water management and good plucking standards.”

This system is a great way to drive improvements, not just to environmental standards, but also to productivity and quality, which is an enormous advantage to each smallholder farmer.

“We’re really impressed with the efforts that everyone at Kionyo and Imenti have gone to,” adds Ian, “and we’re all hoping to hear that they’ve successfully achieved Rainforest Alliance certification in the near future.”