We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Esha And Smita Chhabra And Satiani. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Esha and Smita below.
Esha and Smita, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
Alaya Tea is a self-funded company owned by two Indian-American women. Esha was born in India and migrated here with her family at a young age and Smita’s parents are first-generation immigrants. We grew up in South Asian homes where tea was celebrated everyday. Yet, we saw that this is a coffee-drinking country. Although the third wave coffee movement really took off in the US in the past decade, Americans are still discovering tea. Whereas people have strong opinions about the origins of their coffee (i.e. Sumatra, Colombia, Kenya, Ethiopia), tea origin stories (beyond the wildly popular matcha) are lesser known, or how to brew it in a tea pot. Plus, did you know that all teas come from one plant and it’s the fermentation and drying process that gives different flavors? As we’ve been doing tastings and educational sessions, we’re see that there’s so much to share about the world of tea, a drink that’s so ubiquitous throughout Asia. In addition to being an eco-forward company, we hope to create more education around tea.
As we delved into building this business, we learned that large tea companies (the massive conglomerates) store teas and herbs in warehouses for years. So what you’re drinking could have been harvested over 2-3 years ago! Along with that many tea bags are flavored with artificial flavors (and even the “natural” ones are dubious). When we launched in 2019, the BBC ran a piece on the microplastics in the average tea bag. We’ve exchanged quality for convenience; each cup of tea brewed in hot water unleashes plastics, which we’re ingesting and polluting into our system.
Instead, we want American consumers to discover the beautiful world of fresh loose-leaf tea direct from origin, brewed slowly, and savored. With packaging that does the least harm to the environment.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Alaya Tea came together over drinks one night in SF. Smita, who had worked in the climate change and social impact sectors, had always wanted to start a different type of tea company, one that paid respect to Indian land and workers, while making quality tea more accessible. Esha, an environmental journalist for the past 10 years, had just returned from Darjeeling, one of India’s most iconic tea growing regions. There, she learned about how tea farmers were actively mitigating climate change’s impacts in the Himalayas (things like erratic rainfall, landslides, and erosion). Together we thought – can we purchase directly from these growers and create a more eco-friendly, social impact focused tea brand?Alaya was born soon after.
Unlike much of the tea industry (which relies on auction houses and traders), we source directly from farmers and tea estates. No middlemen or brokers involved. This way, farmers can get a higher price for their crops, reinvesting those funds into their farming practices and the people who work the land. Our shorter supply chain also allows customers to get the freshest product, not tea that has been sitting in a warehouse for months or even years. We think that’s a win-win.
We work with Fair Trade (or Fair For Life) farms for all of our teas and herbals: thus, workers receive benefits like housing, pension funds, healthcare, and educational training. Plus, the estates we work with are not only about the health of their workers, but the health of the planet as well. They are certified organic, biodynamic, and some even regenerative organic! So they’re rebuilding soils, combating climate change in their regions, planting trees to protect from landslides and runoff (especially important in hilly areas such as Darjeeling); making their own organic fertilizers using bio waste and local materials; using mulch and covering the soil, and just leaving areas for forestry amidst the tea gardens.
All of this is packaged in compostable packaging and served loose-leaf. No plastic!
Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.
While we each had 10+ years of experience in the environmental and social impact spaces, we launched Alaya with little experience in the food and beverage industry. Over the last 7 years, we have spent countless hours educating ourselves on everything from supply chains and sourcing, to manufacturing eco-friendly packaging down to the labels and ink. We’ve received generous advice from other entrepreneurs and experts, and have scaled our 100% self-funded business to where it is today through a lot of learning and help from others.
Manufacturing our products in an eco-friendly way – everything from sourcing regenerative organic teas to finding eco-friendly packaging, was a monstrous learning curve for us, despite being pretty invested in the world of sustainability. And we still haven’t figured it out — we’re always hungry to find better, more renewable sources for the tea itself, and the packaging we use.
From our inception, we’ve chosen to package our tea using the most eco-friendly solutions on the market for a small business. We use 100% compostable bags with a bio-based zipper on top, allowing customers to reseal the pouch between brews and preserve freshness. The label is printed with certified compostable ink, on 100% recycled content made with post-consumer waste, and attached using a water-based adhesive. We ship directly to consumers in a biodegradable mailer. Our goal is to be a zero-waste company, or as close as possible. We have to work with what the market offers and there’s a lot of R&D happening in packaging right now. So we are excited about adapting and adopting even better solutions when they become available to small businesses.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We could have never imagined 6 months after starting a business that imports products, that a global pandemic would have happened. As we were seeing an increase in tea drinking, as more Americans look to personal wellness during that difficult time. However, despite these silver linings, COVID rocked supply chains, causing huge disruptions in the cost and speed of our shipments from India. Our shipments increased 4x and took significantly longer to get to us. And it was domino effect. Because India had to put in measures to ensure the safety of their workers (and rightly so), exporting became more complex. This made it so much harder to plan inventory as a small business, and have the capital necessary adapt to these stark changes. We also saw changes in how consumers purchased food products (less in person, and everything online!) All of these changes forced us to pivot our business. We beefed up our online website (adding blogposts, explainers, and a focus on SEO), started engaging with corporate customers that wanted to reach their virtual employees — we even did a white labeled tea for Spotify and their employees! Instead of introducing our brand and products to customers in a grocery store sampling setting, we started doing virtual tea tastings, for both existing customers and to discover new ones. Of course now that it’s 2025 so many people are back to the “pre-COVID” ways of working and shopping, but some of these new additions to our business have stuck around for good.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alayatea.co
- Instagram: @alayatea
Image Credits
Esha Chhabra, Smita Satiani, Alaya Tea