This post has nothing to do with the famous game “where is Charlie?” where you had to find someone called Charlie in a crowd who sometimes were wearing the same clothes as him. And no, it has nothing to do with Mike + the Mechanics, apart from the last part of the name of this famous band from before (before being different for the different people but I must get back on tracks), so let’s begin with my topic of the day: mechanisation.

Mechanisation is switching from a work done by hand or animals to one done by machines. This is a process that began a long time ago, when a man or a woman decided to use hand tools to perform certain tasks.

The idea was probably first to do a better job, to ease things, to be more productive. One of the first examples of a “modern” tool like this one was the mechanical reaper invented by the Celts (and then forgotten before being reinvented in the 19^th century) and that might originate in a shortage of labour.

This was the main reason behind the increase in the use of mechanical devices in Western Europe since with first, the industrial revolution that led to less people being available in the fields and then the First World War, a big shortage of labourers appeared at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century. In the USA, the situation was different because of the sheer size of the country and its “low” density when compared to Western Europe.

What are the main advantages in using mechanical devices to harvest, pluck… different products?

First, in most sectors, machines have become cheaper than man (if you include all the costs). Second, the raw productivity difference/the efficiency (how much hectares can be harvested by each of them in one hour) is clearly an advantage for the machines.

What are the disadvantages? For most fragile crops or for those with specific plucking needs, the problem is that mechanical plucking is destructive since hand work can be more specific and cautious. This is or this is not a problem depending on how the tea is later treated (CTC or whole leaf teas with the tip and two leaves or going into teabags for one of the big companies out there).

Since the main advantage of mechanisation is to replace man, it is no wonder that machines are more used in countries with either a less numerous work force (because fewer people are available for this kind of job or because the population numbers are low), a costly one… A few names? Japan, the United States, some places in India…

Just look at the videos below.

Is this something new? Not really.

“The method was to turn the tea plantations into outdoor factories, to « industrialise » every stage of the process as far as possible and by this method to reduce costs. […] What made tea plantations special was that they took the process from start to finish; from the clearing of the land, through planting and picking”

“The normal solution in such a situation would be to mechanise”

Green Gold by Alan MacFarlane and Iris MacFarlane, Ebury Press 2003

These two quotes describe the situation in Assam in the 1860s when people invested a lot after the boom in the tea industry and faced some problems like the not optimised nature of their estates, the high mortality rate on the plantations, the need to “import” people to work there (with really harsh conditions during the travels).

As I said, mechanisation began a long time ago and will not stop anywhere soon. The only question we need to answer is can engineers design machines that will be able to pluck every kind of tea without breaking it?

This remains to be seen.

Where does tea come from? I don’t mean where exactly but who controls it? Who produces the more?

Believe it or not the answer is not easy to find. Thanks to Internet and the Economic Times, I found out that in 2014, the world’s largest bulk tea company was McLeod Russel India Ltd (a company I had never heard of) and that it was aiming at diversifying its plantation business to mitigate risks and grow in the coming years. I then found out that the second largest company was Tata Beverages Limited.

I began looking all over to see if I could find more info about production, number of estates, locations… and I couldn’t find much. I was able to find some information for McLeod Russel India Ltd but not always consistent with other sources found on the website. One reason could be that merger and acquisitions make things complicated to follow but as you can see below this is probably not the main reason.

Tea estates of McLeod Russel India Ltd (source McLeod Russel Groupe website)

With merger and acquisitions, the area under production would change and increase and except for the last year, for which I found evidence in another place that new estates were added, this is was here obviously not what happened as the areas and even the estates stayed the same over the 6 years period (yes you can find their names if you look for it).

This peculiar company focus has always been in Assam and Dooars, probably for historical reasons. However recently, they acquired estates in other countries (Rwanda, Uganda and Vietnam), bringing their number of estates to 63.

How do this new estates compare to the others? I collected some data, that are not 100% consistent with the ones found earlier but that should be able to give us some insights on this peculiar question.

Tea estates from the McLeod Russel Group (source McLeod Russel Group website)

What can we learn from this table?

That the main activity from the McLeod Russel Group is still made in India, where they have most of their teas estates, the bigger ones and those with the highest production level. However the new “countries” have estates that on average are as big as those from the “old” ones (apart for Vietnam, where they are slightly smaller) and are fare more productive (between 2 and 3 times more). This could be explained by the younger age of the plants, the geographical organisation of each estate and perhaps by more intensive production techniques.

Now that we know a little more about the largest bulk tea company in the world, how does it fare when compared to both the production and the size of the area under production? I will not look at productivity as the list of tea producing countries is so big with countries in different parts of the world that it would be like comparing peaches and apples, they are both fruits but not at all comparable.

Here the obvious source of information is the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), an UN agency that has a database with a lot of data on nearly everything produced. However as always, this kind of data is long to collect, which means that if I can go back to 1961, I can only come back to 2014. But one has to do what he can with what he has.

Regarding this timeframe, I will also have to make one last assumption as McLeod Russel Group publishes data for periods overlapping 2 years (for example 2010-2011) where as the FAO is on a yearly set of data. I will therefore compare 2010-2011 to 2010 and so on.

Worldwide weight of McLeod Russel India (source McLeod Russel Group website and FAO database)

The biggest bulk tea company is worth 1% of the total tea production areas in the world and around 1.5% of the tea produced in the world in any said year.

This brings two comments: the first one is that the productivity of each tea hectare owned by McLeod Russel India must be higher than the average productivity in the world (otherwise both weights calculated above would be the same), which says something about this last one as we saw earlier that the productivity on McLeod Russel India was overshadowed by the one from its newest estates. However as we all know it, productivity in tea isn’t the Alpha and the Omega of everything.

The second comment is that in the tea world, a giant producer is still a small player. Why do I say that? In most industries, the top 20% manage to produce or to sell 80% of the total production (this is a rule of thumb based on the Pareto distribution) while here because of the dispersion of production, it seems rather unlikely that such a level of control can be reached from the production side. The only reason that could lead to a high concentration level would be if the market on the “customer” side was dominated by a few big names that could buy most of the production and be in a situation of monopoly. But this would be another thing to study.

No I won’t speak about the dollar, the Divine Providence or the Eye of Sauron. Although I think it would be interesting to ponder whether or not the whole history of the Middle Earth or of Arda would have been different if tea had been used from the beginning with Melkor. But writing such an uchronia would be something for another post and with the many pages written by J.R.R. Tolkien, it would be a shame to summarize all of them to a nice afternoon tea in the newly created Arda.

If I get back to my original topic and stay on tracks, I would like to remind all of us that we, human beings always try to solve problems through the use of our intelligence or of the tools we created. Just look at different myths starting with Prometheus or with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein among others (yes it seems I am in a big literature cycle right now with all kinds of references coming to my mind when I think on a topic).

The problem I am referring to is one that has always been important to any tea drinker, the increase in quality of the tea leaves. Peasants have been working on such problems for centuries and probably since the beginning of human history, selecting the best species to improve the overall quality, productivity of harvests/beasts…

Looking at different things on this trend, I just found out that like in other fields, the newest or latest technology (satellite) is being used to survey tea with a focus on improving its quality.

The idea behind this use is that the chemicals that are contained in the leaves are giving its colour, its taste… Thanks to the satellite views and data analysis, scientists are able to survey the different aspects of tea and predict the quality and quantity of the next harvest. They are also working on ways to improve the next production batches thank to all the data collected.

Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) map showing the sections of two particular tea clones on the Tocklai Tea Estate, in Assam, Northeast India. Source: NASA

I knew that they were doing things like that for corns or for big productions like that, combining GPS, satellite views, work in labs to optimise the production, be it in quantity or quality. And even so, a little more rain or sun at the wrong period of time and the results are not that outstanding.

I must confess that I am not a peasant and that I don’t really know how things work but can everything be kept under control or monitored? After all, tea is a product of the land, the sky and of man. There are incidents, changes, things that were not foreseen and that are not always replicable but that can produce unique products.

A further question is do we really want all the teas to taste the same? This is done for some blends that are a mix of different teas and that have to taste the same, whatever the quality/taste/quantities of the different teas that are mixed into it can be in any given year but this is part of the charm of drinking tea, what we drink can change slightly or more between each year.

Call me old fashioned but I like the surprise and the uncertainty of letting Mother Nature do her own work. Of course, we can try to improve things, try to control things but should we really do it all the way along and for everything?

After all, according to some stories, the first tea was made when a dead leaf from a wild tea bush felt into the boiled water from Emperor Shennong. If this is not an unforeseen consequences of a little bit of chaos/luck, I don’t know what it is.

Today, I won’t speak to you the reader but to the companies who sell us tea and I will speak about traceability or the capacity to know where one thing comes from, where it went, how it was changed, how it was transported…
And for doing so, is there any better choice than Hamlet by Shakespeare to guide us on this path? Perhaps at the end, will you all tell me that this is Much Ado about Nothing.

It isn’t that I don’t trust you but there are many middlemen in the business and in the supply chain between the place of production and my cup of tea that one could easily be lost out there and some scandals in the last years in different industries (not only in the food ones) have shown us that big or small companies are not protected against bad behaviours.
I know that some people think that a product has to be good “per se” and that rather than having to write on bio/fair trade/sustainable… products that they are this way, only the bad/non bio/… (put here whatever you dislike) ones should have an indication written down that they are “bad” but I think it is not enough and there should be some traceability added to know more about what we drink.
As I said, I do trust you (to be honest, I do it most of the time but not always) but knowing where my cup of tea comes from is rather important to me for several reasons.

First, I want to be sure that I drink what is supposed to be in the pack. When you know that in spite of becoming a Geographical Indication, there is still year after year, more Darjeeling drank in the world as this area produces…
Second, behind each tea there is a man, a land, a “terroir”, something that makes it unique, that gives it its taste, the little something that set it apart from a generic tea from the same area or from any other area. Knowing where the tea you are drinking comes from and who made it seems logical. After all, tea is produced by land, air and people and we all know that like wine, “terroir” (in the more restricted geographical definition of this word) has a great importance for tea.
Third, behind each tea or each blend (even if it is I think more complex for this category and something else could be created for it (with a further differentiation between a blend of teas and a blend of teas with other things in)), there is a story and I am not talking here about the marketing one but rather about the real one. You know this story that really tells us where the idea from this tea comes from and why it was “created” or did someone decided to go in a certain direction and not in another and let’s be honest, it is far easier to do with some indications rather from ground zero.

I already hear the different companies complaining that it is too costly to look up for this information or to print it down.
I will start with the second one, since nowadays, this is no longer an excuse. Most of us have Internet, smartphones allowing us to scan codes and automatically get the info we need/want/think we need… Why not do that? And there are simple ways to do that at a rather low cost (be it in the store, on Internet, on the packages…).
There again, the first complain will be used as an excuse. However, and here I will talk to the “big” companies (big being perhaps a big word in the tea industry) but they should know where the product was bought, where it comes from and how it come to the store. If not, there is a problem.
If “big” companies do it, the information will be available for the smaller ones, for the sellers… and therefore for us, the drinkers.

Nowadays, there is a big word going around in the head of several politicians at different levels: Open Data. Everything has to be “Open Data” but what does it really mean? That those with information open this information and share it with other people, with foreigners, allowing for new products, new ideas to appear.
This is what should happen as today, customers are looking for information, are trying to become more literate, more knowledgeable and this is a way for them to reach this goal and for the companies to guide them on this path, a path that will lead some of the customers to look out for higher quality products with higher prices, giving in the end the tea companies that follow this path a reward for their dedication and creating for them and the customers a win-win situation.

And guess what? William Shakespeare had foreseen this quest for more knowledge:
“And seeing ignorance is the curse of God,
Knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”