Linda Appel Lipsius
Taking skills she learned from her family’s cleaning product business, Linda Appel Lipsius has not only helped create a thriving Bangladeshi tea company in one of the poorest parts of the world—but also brought literacy and math education to the workers.
Inspiration
In 2006, Lipsius was in the process of selling her family’s Colorado-based company, Orange Glo (makers of OxiClean, among other household cleaning products), when a friend from Bangladesh asked for help with his family’s tea estate. Lipsius was six months pregnant with her first child and not sure how much she wanted to get involved, but the prospect sounded interesting. She told him she’d explore it and see what the opportunities were.
“The more I learned, the deeper I got into it,” she found. Soon, she and her friend, Kazi Anis Ahmed, co-founded Teatulia, sourcing organic tea leaves from a single-estate tea garden in Tetulia, a northern region in Bangladesh that’s one of the poorest parts of the world.
Lipsius, 44, had not worked in the specialty food business before but felt that her family’s former company prepared her to produce and sell a premium, eco-friendly product. She had spent a year in Ireland and four years working in London where she drank and appreciated tea.
“But I was not a hardcore, tea geek fanatic,” she says.
In general, she wasn’t sure about Americans’ thirst for tea, nor how much they cared about its sustainable sourcing from garden to cup. “Most folks don’t even know where Bangladesh is, and it hadn’t been known for producing high-quality tea,” she says. “Anis and his family were ahead of the curve where the industry was going.”
Tetulia, Bangladesh was not only suffering from poverty, she learned, its land was drying up into a barren desert. Digging rocks for the construction industry had destroyed the topsoil. Rock-lifting was one of the few means of employment. Building a viable company there would be no light task.
Impact
Teatulia’s garden uses reclaimed water, no chemicals, pesticides or fertilizer. It is the only USDA-certified organic farm in Bangladesh.
“Now the region is a lush paradise,” Lipsius reports. “Through our organic farming, it’s helped restore the ecosystem. Wildlife and plant species that had disappeared have come back.”
Teatulia employs more than 600 women as pluckers of tea leaves and another 1,700 people in other areas of production. “Women get paid a fair wage directly; it doesn’t go through their husbands,” she says, and emphasizes, “Our tea garden is just a job. They get to go home at night and be with their families. A large part of the tea industry is not like that, with companies settling people in isolated work camps, separated from their communities. At a lot of them the conditions are shocking.”
Most of the workers who came to Teatulia were illiterate and without math skills. Teatulia instituted a literacy program that includes libraries and technology training for children. “A woman told me, ‘I will never get cheated at the market again because now I can count to 10.’”
A cornerstone of Teatulia’s social advocacy is lending cattle to women in exchange for dung used as compost on the farm. The company needs tremendous amounts of manure and did not want to go into the dairy cow business, so the loans were a symbiotic solution. Families get to keep calves that are born. All tea sales support a farming co-op, the Kazi Shahid Foundation, dedicated to improving the lives of the local community.
In Teatulia’s mission to be sustainable in every way possible, Lipsius designed packaging that uses minimal waste. Tea canisters are compostable. Unbleached corn-silk tea bags are biodegradable, made without strings, staples, or tags. Labels are printed with non-toxic, water-based ink. All tea is sold within a year of being picked.
“We believe in tea being very pure and don’t add flavors, fruits or colors,” she says. There are 18 types of tea in their portfolio, including Ginger Green Tea, Oolong, Chamomile, Lemongrass, Rooibos, and Earl Grey. “When people taste our tea it’s clean and it’s fresh, with flavor profiles that are super-unique.”
The Future
“Tea is growing massively but we’re still tiny compared to coffee,” Lipsius says. “The biggest challenge is lack of tea knowledge, but we’re gaining steam.” She divides their customers into “tea geeks” and “tea-curious” and does everything she can to educate people. “We try to present tea, both hot and iced, as being accessible and unintimidating and are promoting new ways to drink it, such as tea sodas and tea cocktails.” In 2015, Teatulia launched a new and well-received Energy line of tea (Energy Black, Energy Green, and Energy Red) infused with the herb eleuthero root, which is said to have energizing properties.
The garden in Bangladesh is about 3,000 acres and will grow as demand for tea increases and more surrounding land becomes available. A large portion of the farm is devoted to certified-organic crops of vegetables and fruit.
“We want to get Americans excited about tea,” Lipsius says. “Our story is authentic and unique and the impact we’re having is unrivaled. When we can get in front of people and explain what we do, we have customers for life.”