When you sell organic loose leaf tea, it’s important to have a good relationship with your organic tea vendor. Here are some crucial questions to ask before purchasing your organic teas with your tea vendors.
Are they Certified Organic?
Did you know that you could be fined for labeling a food as organic when it isn’t? Make sure to ask your tea vendor about their organic certification. Not all organic labels are created equal, use the right label for the right type of certification. All teas at Divinitea are certified USDA Organic.
Are they providing you with the selection and variety you need?
Customers like variety. You’ll want to offer a selection to satisfy a wide range of palates. Be sure that your vendor can provide you with a range of teas to refresh your tea selection from time to time.
At Divinitea, we offer our wholesale clients over 300 blends of certified organic teas to choose from.
Are they fresh?
A tea can sound great on paper, but if it isn’t fresh, it just won’t taste good, and that can hurt your reputation. Make sure to ask how long your tea vendor keeps teas on the shelf. At Divinitea, we order our bulk ingredients in smaller quantities and blend everything to order. We do this for two reasons. 1. We don’t have a huge warehouse; we have limited space to do our blending, so we keep inventory low. 2. We want to keep everything as fresh as possible. We only order what we will go through from month to month. We guarantee the finest quality and fresh sourced herbs and teas.
Can you get the samples you need?
You can’t really know what kind of tea you want until you try it. A good tea vendor will offer samples so you can find out what you would like to carry. At Divinitea, we offer all our wholesale clients free samples upon request.
How long does it take to get your teas?
To do proper inventory on teas, you have to factor in how long it takes to get your tea once your order is placed. Whatever you have in stock should last until you get your new order in. Tea inventory is more of an art than a science. It will take a little time, but you’ll get the hang of it!
At Divinitea, we ship all our wholesale orders via UPS, usually within 1-2 business days of receiving the order.
Do you get information about the teas?
It’s hard to sell a tea if you don’t know anything about it. A good tea vendor will offer descriptions of their blends. At Divinitea, our wholesale customers have special access to our staff by email or phone whenever they need descriptions of our teas.
Can your blender do a custom blend for your establishment?
It’s nice to know that if you can’t find a specific tea, you can have one custom blended for you. Unfortunately, not many organic tea vendors will make a blend for you.
Because we blend teas to order, we can accommodate special requests. If we don’t carry a tea you’re looking for, we can make a custom blend for you, please note that if we special order ingredients, there is a 10 lb minimum order.
Can you resell these teas with your name on them?
In case you want to label teas under your own name, it’s important to understand the rules first.
When you purchase from Divinitea, you can label teas under your own name, but please note that due to USDA regulations, if your business is not certified organic, you may not put the word “Organic” in the name of the tea, though you may mark the ingredients in the tea as organic.