Storehouse Tea: Storehouse Tea in the News

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Storehouse Tea in the News

Crain's Cleveland Business December 9-15, 2013

Equitable Approach

Businesses that participate in Fair Trade face some challenges, but strongly believe there is an alternative way to do good

By Sharon Schnall

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20131208/FREE/312089970

After meeting reporter Sharon Schnall at the Geauga Fresh Farmers Market one Saturday afternoon, I was excited to get a Linked in invite as well as a phone call asking if she could interview me for a piece on businesses who practice Fair Trade. I am a strong believer in what you put out there comes back to you, so supporting Fair Trade was a no brainer for me. I am a female business owner who wants to be paid fairly for our high quality organic fair trade teas. I purchase Fair trade certified teas because it ensures that the beautiful women who pick my tealeaves are being treated ethically and paid fairly too! Supporting Fair Trade is more than nice branding for my business, it's quite simply how the world should be conducting business, fairly!

Crain's Cleveland Business January 13-19, 2014

Making a large Leap onto the Shelves

Companies can reap benefits from working with big-box stores, but there are plenty of challenges

By Sharon Schnall

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20140112/FREE/301129975

Storehouse Tea has been on the shelves of Whole Foods, Earth Fare and Market District stores around the state of Ohio for the past 2 years. All of these stores include local companies like ours on their shelves but there are challenges. Grocery stores are like mini retail spaces, it's all about location. We have to fight for consistent and decent shelf placement, a lot of times our product is moved to make way for the bigger brands who have marketing dollars to pay for advertising, prime shelf space and running sales and coupons. Often we are placed in areas of the store not anywhere near the tea aisle like in a "local section" making it hard for shoppers to find us let alone compare pricing. We pay a high percentage to these stores just to carry our teas and we invest time each month to demo our teas in their stores. The pay off has been slower than we thought, mostly because we are still building brand awareness and educating their customers of the health benefit of loose leaf teas vs. tea bags. We are excited to launch our new packaging in the next 30-60 days , and hope to create better brand awareness and visibility. We will keep you updated on our progress. In the meantime, if you're having trouble finding our product in these stores or your happy that they are carrying our teas, please send us an email at info@storehousetea.com so we can forward them to the manager of that store.

About Storehouse Tea

Dan and I are part of the 76 million baby boomers who want to stay healthy and live longer. Seven years ago, we took that old coffee maker off the counter and replaced it with a beautiful functional infuser teapot. At first we both missed the caffeine addiction buzz, but we didn’t miss the jittery, anxious feeling we got when we drank it and the headaches and crabbiness if we didn’t. My husband, Dan, feels his health and overall wellbeing has increased and he has more continuous energy. I believe coffee caused me repeated kidney stones, headaches, bloating and fibroids. Thank God I have none of that in my life anymore!

Dan and I have left our coffee addiction behind and have fully embraced tea drinking as a lifestyle choice, and what a difference it has made in our lives, we are blessed! So with this new passion we’ve decided to share our knowledge and enthusiasm for high quality Certified Organic and Fair Trade loose-leaf teas, making them available to as many people as possible by turning our passion into a business, Storehouse Tea Company.

The art of drinking tea has been around for 5,000 years. It’s amazing to us that there are still a lot of people who have never experienced drinking loose leaf tea. Most of the world drinks whole leaf tea, unfortunately we Americans invented the tea bag and since then we have been missing out of about 300% of all the great health benefits, flavor and freshness that whole leaf teas offer us. So with that being said all of our teas are sold loose, which means they are not in tea bags. We purchase the most current crop from that picking season, and purchase as much Fair Trade tea and ingredients as we can. Most of what America drinks is produced by big industry making it just another bland, dissipated, expired, useless cup of nothing! The teas we’re passionate about offering you are the best you’ll ever taste, small batch blending using fresh organic ingredients which are the healthiest for you! Our customers won’t go back to tea bags again!! We love our teas, and drink them every day, so do our three teenagers, we would not give you something that we don’t absolutely believe in, trust and love. Here is what you won’t find in Storehouse Organic Teas …no carbohydrates, no calories, no fats, no sugars, no artificial colorings, no preservatives, no pesticides.

We offer a beautiful selection of Organic loose leaf teas and beautiful, practical and functional infuser tea ware. Check out our website storehousetea.com and go under "All about Tea" tab to "Tea and Health" to find amazing studies that point to all the great properties that fresh loose leaf teas contain.

Our vision for Storehouse Tea Company is to be ethical and socially conscious as well. So providing Certified Organic tea was only the beginning. We feel our customers want to be sure that people in underdeveloped countries are being paid a reasonable price for their teas. Fair Trade Certification empowers farmers and farm workers to lift themselves out of poverty by investing in their farms and communities, protecting the environment, and developing the business skills necessary to compete in the global marketplace. Our suppliers purchase from Fair Trade producer groups as directly as possible, guaranteeing to pay above market prices, eliminating unnecessary middlemen and empowering farmers to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global marketplace. Harmful agrochemicals and GMOs are strictly prohibited in favor of environmentally sustainable farming methods that protect farmers’ health and preserve valuable ecosystems for future generations. We try to purchase as much Fair Trade tea as possible, so that we can give back to the world. We also feel connected to the Farms that have so diligently provided this amazing tea for us. We know it has not been sitting in some warehouse for years, we know exactly where it comes from, how it was grown and we know it was from the spring or fall crop that year. Fresh is the best!