The world produces enough tea for each person on the planet to drink a cup a day. That is a remarkable outcome for what was once an obscure shrub growing wild in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan. Early favour is attributed to Shennong, the legendary Chinese ruler from the first millennium BCE, who catalogued medicinal herbs and postulated that tea clears the mind and lightens the body. In a world replete with digital distraction and weight-loss potions, this age-old elixir feels contemporary.
Tea’s popularity was not inevitable. It gained scale around 1000 CE during the Song dynasty when productivity improvements in rice cultivation freed land and labour. Tea emerged as a State-sanctioned alternative crop.
Over the next thousand years, this Himalayan herb did more than refresh drinkers. It shaped history. By the eighteenth century, tea had become the core business of the East India Company. Revenues from the China tea trade underwrote the Company’s expansion and financed the consolidation of British power in India. The venture became more lucrative when Bengal and Bihar, already under Company administration, were redirected toward opium cultivation, with exports to China used to settle the trade for tea. Around the same time, tea was planted commercially in Assam following trials at the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta. Early plantations relied on a smuggled Chinese variety, Camellia sinensis, before shifting to the native Camellia assamica, which had long grown wild in the region.
While tea entrenched imperial power across Asia, it fuelled revolt in America. A tax triggered the Boston Tea Party and set America on the road to independence. The red and white stripes of the American flag echo the East India Company’s banner and, centuries later, the modern Tea Party incorporated the language of protest and taxation into contemporary conservative politics.
Tea transformed business by innovating formats across operations, marketing and organisation. Its long-distance trade turned logistics into a competitive advantage, and the race to land fresh cargo drove the development of the clipper, a ship built for commerce. As volumes expanded and tea entered everyday consumption in Victorian Britain, concerns over adulteration altered how food was sold. Tea became one of the earliest consumer goods to be sealed in packs, with Horniman’s Pure Tea, introduced in 1826, offering a guarantee of quality that later brands would emulate. The colonial tea enterprise required coordination across labour, processing, finance, insurance, shipping and retail. Managing this scale lay beyond the capacity of private merchants, giving rise to managing-agency houses such as Jardine Matheson, Finlays and Andrew Yule — corporate entities that separated ownership from management and foreshadowed modern, financialised firms.
Today, tea is grown in more than 50 countries and consumed in more than 150, yet the business model is broken. Prices have stagnated, costs have risen, climate volatility is eroding yields, and much of the industry survives by producing more of what the world already has in surplus.
Tea’s value lies as much in how it is consumed and the semiotics it carries as how it is grown. Yet, while tea is cultivated largely in Asia and Africa, its brands, formats and consumption cultures are shaped elsewhere. When production and consumption are separated across geographies and firms, producers lose proximity to the consumer and the ability to foster demand. It is telling that the last major product innovation in tea came in the 1930s with the introduction of CTC processing, after which the category saw little evolution. It is fitting, then, that the most influential tea movements of recent decades emerged not from the colonial export chain but from places where tea remained embedded in everyday life. Matcha, cultivated by Japanese monks, transformed tea into ritual. Boba tea from Taiwan gave tea a youthful expression with global reach. In Calcutta, masala chai paired with samosas evolved on the streets around Dalhousie Square to suit the palate of boxwallah babus. In each case, value arose from cultural confidence rooted in knowledge of the consumer.
At the heart of these storied rituals lies a kernel of chemistry. Tea is the most affordable delivery system of caffeine, the world’s most widely consumed psychoactive substance. Over centuries, people have sought a gentle way to stay alert, focused and socially connected through long hours of activity. Tea became global because its effects were mild and repeatable. A drink becomes universal only when it becomes habitual.
That logic is newly relevant. Even as medicine advances from robotic surgery and AI diagnostics to gene therapies, global health faces pressures that clinical intervention alone cannot resolve. Non-communicable diseases, obesity and mental-health concerns, along with the everyday miseries of disrupted sleep, chronic stress and poor diets, now afflict life for billions. These conditions have long been the focus of ayurveda, a system of living oriented toward balance among body, mind and environment. Yet, unlike tea, ayurveda never became a daily habit. Its ideas remained therapeutic rather than part of lived ritual. India grows many of these botanicals at scale: ashwagandha, tulsi, brahmi, amla and turmeric all thrive in tea regions, but they remain largely confined to powders, pastes and potions that are poorly packaged, difficult to carry, and unpleasant to consume. Tea, by contrast, has already evolved into the world’s favourite habit, portable, repeatable, and easy to consume. Bringing the two together allows producers to move from commodity to wellness without abandoning familiarity. Tea estates can grow medicinal botanicals, blend them with tea, and create formats suited to contemporary lives, from hot infusions to cold brews and ready-to-drink beverages. From Shennong’s early observations to matcha’s modern reinvention, tea has succeeded when it sits at the intersection of health, energy and habit.
Yet improving the appeal of tea as a beverage will not, on its own, secure the future of the colonial tea estate. Tea provides livelihoods to around 13 million people worldwide, spanning plantation workers, small farmers and rural communities. The economic foundations of this system have collapsed. Wages are under pressure, costs spiral, yet the rigid estate model has left little room for adaptation. To endure, estates must evolve beyond asset-intensive, single-crop production toward structures that support broader participation and resilience.
Rwanda offers a useful illustration. There, smallholder farmers are contracted to successful tea factories, securing strong auction prices. Farmers commit leaf under transparent revenue-sharing arrangements that link returns to performance, while factories benefit from assured scale and quality. Applied broadly, this estate-collective model allows high-performing estates to anchor surrounding growers, widening value without diluting standards. From there, estates can function as multi-use landscapes rather than monocrop factories.
Many tea regions sit within ecosystems of exceptional value where high-altitude forests and river valleys have endured because tea cultivation resisted deforestation and soil erosion over long periods. Through social and commercial forestry, estates can stabilise soils, regulate water flows, moderate local temperatures and sequester carbon, while FSC-certified timber grown alongside tea restores degraded land and generates steady income. Seen this way, the tea estate becomes climate infrastructure rather than a relic of colonial agriculture. These landscapes already support wildlife at scale, from elephant corridors in Assam and chimpanzee habitats bordering African tea gardens to leopard buffer zones in the Dooars. They can also support ecological tourism, walking trails and outdoor camps that diversify livelihoods without overwhelming fragile environments.
Tea began as a medicinal herb. It conquered the world by becoming a habit. Today, under pressure from climate stress, health anxiety and economic fragility, it stands at another threshold. The opportunity is not simply to sell more tea, but to reshape landscapes, livelihoods and daily rituals. Tea once changed the world by turning a herb into a habit. With imagination and reform, it can do so again.
Rudra Chatterjee is Chairman of Obeetee, Managing Director of Luxmi Tea, and writes on finance and economic issues
