We’d like to introduce you to one of our customers: We Are Tea! Read a bit below to read in their own words about how their principled business came to be and why they’ve decided to work with us at London Bio Packaging.
How did We Are Tea begin?
We Are Tea began in 2006, in Budapest, in a teashop. Our founders Spence and Suze were on holiday in Budapest. Albeit not the most relaxing holiday as Suze came down with a bout of pneumonia, but they stumbled upon a tea room & found respite in a cup of Moroccan mint tea. They thought “hang on someone’s missed a trick here, why don’t we have tea shops like this back in the UK?!”
Back home and a year later, our tea shop opened its doors, becoming a regular pit stop for the office workers of St Pauls.
The café did well, everyone loved the tea, we won numerous awards, then disaster struck. Just as we were looking to open up a second tea shop Occupy London hit! Due to theft and vandalism the shop sadly closed.
What happened next?
All was not lost! From customer requests to enjoy great tea at home we launched our retail business and secured the first of many national listings, you will now find us in cafes, restaurants, delis, hotels, gyms & spas. Yay!
We are a small but mighty team of 7 working to get our tasty tea into as many cups as possible.
So what’s your approach to the environment?
We are aiming to be as sustainable as possible. To do this we scrapped our original tin packaging for cardboard and joined the Ethical Tea Partnership. We also use 100% biodegradable corn starch whole-leaf teabags and compostable cups.
Compostable cups?! Tell me more!
We love our world and where possible try to give it a helping hand, we supply our cafes and restaurants that sell our tea with 100% compostable takeaway cups and lids from London Bio Packaging - made out of sustainable forest paper with a bio-plastic lining. Unlike regular plastic, bio-plastic is made from plants such as corn and are plastic-free. Pretty amazing stuff.
Only 2% of takeaway cups in the UK are recycled and so by teaming up with London Bio Packaging we hope to try and inspire others to do the same and put the environment first!
Don’t worry we know we still have a way to go, we are working hard towards removing plastic from our packaging, watch this space!
Why did you choose to work with London Bio Packaging?
We came to London Bio Packaging because we had spent a long time searching for an eco-friendly cup solution and liked the idea of working with a London based company (as we are London based too).
We realised we needed to drastically reduce our wastage & the amount of plastic we were putting back into the environment, especially after watching Blue Planet 2!
We created a campaign around the phrase of guilt-free sipping, the idea being that we ethically source the tea you’re drinking and minimise wastage that’s going back into the environment. We loved that with London Bio Packaging it could be a closed loop model, as the cups are made out of bio plastic and can be collected with food waste to be commercially composted to then help grow more plants.
To read more, check out their site: www.wearetea.com
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