We and Bio
Why organic and how to go about it
We have traded in organic tea for many years. Japanese, Nepalese, and Indian from Darjeeling. People often don’t trust the label “organic” really means something. Let’s describe our journey to this certification − it is not easy, but certainly worth it. After a year, we were visited by Abcert representatives who came for a regular revision of ecological farming and organic production of the teas we sell. We have been certified by this German company as an organic producer since 2005. There is a revision every year based on which we are issued a certificate of compliance with the requirements stipulated by an EU regulation.
Certificate
We can sell and label our teas and other products BIO or ORGANIC only with this certificate. We must comply with certain rules and it is also rather costly (we pay for the certification), but we believe that this is the only way to offer you really clean teas from organic production. It is not about the certification of our company here in Prague, but also all the subjects through which our teas go. Everyone has to be certified: the farmer who grows the tea, the factory that processes it, and the potential traders who sell it to us. On its way here, the tea must be clearly labeled and travel across borders and through customs under a specific export number that is stated in the invoice and delivery sheets. It is often a difficult battle with bureaucracy, but this process is a guarantee that the teas we sell as BIO/ORGANIC are really clean.
We and BIO − who has the money?
Not everyone can afford the certification. Particularly small farmers from developing countries choose to sell their teas as conventional rather than to pay large sums for the certificate. For them, it is of course a much more expensive process, plus it takes several years. During the, usually five, years that the changeover to organic production takes, the yield drops by ten to twenty percent, which affects the farmers rather significantly. It comes without saying that such a drop, together with other expenditures connected with certification, is reflected by higher prices of tea.
We often see that in such places as Taiwan, farmers are certified by universities and different associations that are not recognized in the EU. We don’t label such teas as bio or organic. Anyhow, we prefer them to teas by producers who don’t consider going organic at all.
We believe that we will be able to offer you more and more organic teas. That more and more teas grown in the world will be really clean. And that chemistry will disappear from tea cultivation.
Certificates:
ABCERT bio certificate
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