There's a quiet moment, when you brew a tea you trust, where you stop wondering where it came from. The cup is enough. But trust is built backwards — through the relationships, the choices, and the people standing behind what's in the pouch. This page is that backward look. It's how we source our teas, who we work with, and where the supply chain meets its real limits.
Darjeeling, India
Niraj grew up in Darjeeling. The relationships with the gardens there are the oldest part of Happy Earth Tea, and they shape how we think about sourcing everywhere else.
Risheehat, located across the valley from Darjeeling town, has been part of our offerings for more than ten years — one of our longest direct garden relationships. It sits at altitudes where the leaf develops slowly and concentrates the muscatel character that Darjeeling is known for. The first flush teas we carry each spring come from Risheehat, and so do the seasonal pickings that follow.
Okayti, in the Mirik Valley, has been producing tea since the 1880s and is one of the few Darjeeling gardens that has stayed committed to organic cultivation through the difficult years for the industry. We began offering Okayti teas a couple of years ago, and the relationship has grown from there.
Nepal
Jun Chiyabari, in the Dhankuta district, is a family-run garden that has done more than almost anyone in the region to demonstrate that Nepali tea belongs in the same conversation as the great Darjeelings. We've worked with them for years. Their teas reward attention — the kind of cup that changes character as it cools.
Japan
Our Japanese green teas and matcha come from Osada Tea Company in Shizuoka, an organic tea grower and manufacturer working in a region with deep tea history. Organic production in Japan is harder than it sounds; Shizuoka's humid summers and the precision required for high-grade green tea mean that growing without synthetic inputs is a genuine commitment, not a marketing position. Osada has made that commitment.
When the matcha shortage and recent customs bottlenecks make direct shipments impractical for certain teas, we fill the gap through US-based organic wholesalers. We'd rather buy direct. We say so when we can't.
China
Our Chinese teas come primarily from Ah Tea Company, who grow and source teas from the Anhui and Fujian regions — the home territories of some of the most storied teas in the world, including the keemuns, the rock oolongs, and the white teas we carry. Direct relationships in China have become harder to maintain in recent years, between tariffs and shifting trade conditions. For some of our Chinese teas, we currently work with US-based organic wholesalers; we're transparent about that because the alternative — pretending everything is direct — isn't the kind of story we're interested in telling.
Taiwan
Our Taiwanese oolongs come through a Taiwan-based distributor rather than from individual farms directly. We work with growers wherever the supply chain allows, and we're transparent about where it doesn't.
Herbal ingredients
The herbs and botanicals in our caffeine-free blends — chamomile, peppermint, hibiscus, rooibos, ginger, and the rest — come from an Oregon-based supplier that is both organic certified and Fair for Life certified. Fair for Life is a fair trade certification that covers labor practices, supply chain ethics, and grower compensation. For ingredients that pass through many hands before they reach a tea blender, that kind of certification matters. We've worked with this supplier for years and trust both their standards and their consistency.
The bigger picture
Direct relationships with five gardens across four countries is a meaningful sourcing footprint for a small tea shop. It's also a partial picture. The places where we work through distributors or wholesalers are real, and we'd rather you know about them than pretend otherwise. Sourcing is not a finished project — it's a set of ongoing choices, made one tea and one season at a time, against the actual conditions of global trade.
What stays constant is the standard: every tea we carry is organically grown at origin. Every blend is built from organic and ethically sourced ingredients. Every pouch is hand-packed in Rochester. The promise we make on the front of the shop — that we care about the people and the planet involved in what we sell — has to hold all the way back through the supply chain, or it doesn't hold at all.
If you'd like to know more about a specific tea or where it comes from, ask us. We're a small enough shop that the answer is usually one conversation away.