We want to celebrate their stories and help share them with you. In fact, the name Picker’s Pocket was inspired by one of these stories. It’s the tale of an age-old practice known to produce the best quality tea, where pickers selected the finest tips and carefully pocketed them. At the end of each day these tips were hand-pressed by the picker, and the brew – along with the day’s stories – was shared with the people they cared about most.
In other words, Picker’s Pocket is about doing things the right way. For us, that means knowing exactly where all our tea is grown, and who grows it. It means giving our expert pickers the respect (and pay) they deserve. And it means sharing with you the story of how our tea came to be."
At Picker's Pocket, we are truly doing something unique. Our growers are at the heart of our business, and everything we do is focussed around how we can support the plantation communities.
Everything that goes into our teas & tisanes comes straight from nature - starting from the high-grade hand-picked black tea to the organically grown spices and New Zealand-grown fruit. We're proud that our teas not only taste great, but they also make an impact - and we hope you love that too!
We are proud to say that on our boxes you will see the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) logo. By choosing this product, you are supporting responsible management of the world's forests. The clear bags containing loose tea are NatureFlex -an award winning compostable material made from plant not plastic.
Doing good has never tasted better. Each of the tea gardens we work with has been responsibly sourced, what does that mean? We ask questions and listen to the answers, there is always more to learn! We get to know the owners and the workers, we don’t just want to know about the quality of the tea (although that has to be fantastic) we want to be sure that each bag of tea we sell is doing good for the local community where our favourite tea plantations are.
This in itself is no small task but we like to aim high!
We have engaged with some tea estates who are already doing great things: following organic farming principles to ensure regeneration of the land they work on, far exceeding minimum government requirements for pay and benefits such as operating a revenue share scheme and a welfare fund for workers as well as training employees in all aspects of the artisanal tea making process.
Like many things when you look deeper into the history of Ceylon tea you discover a far from perfect world where Colonialism dominated and enlisted a workforce of people with promises of work, better living conditions and quality of life for them and their families. Sadly for many people and for many years this was and is still not the case.
We are proud to have been recognised and approved by Fair & Good and Good Market. These are organisations recognising businesses who are making an effort to offer responsible, sustainable solutions for our environment, communities & wildlife. We are super excited to announced that we are a finalist in the Good Food category of the Sustainable Business Awards 2021 and the 2021 NZ Artisan Awards.
We are not perfect but we are dedicated to keep working harder to improve.
We have spent enough time in the tea plantation communities to know that typically they are some of the poorest in Sri Lanka. From day one, supporting the pluckers that bring us our tea has been at the core of what we do. Through our work with charities we knew we needed to dig deep to find the foundation who was aligned with our values. We found Tea Leaf Trust, founded by Tim & Yasmene and have since formed a strong relationship with them.
Tea Leaf Trust was created for the impoverished young people in the tea communities. The focus is on the students mental well being & self esteem making them feel valued and allowing them to be role models in their communities. Education in English broadens students options for future employment enabling them to make choices.
We're always happy to chat and help answer any questions you may have!
