Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jason Ellis. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Jason thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

A passion for food, drink and lazy gardening… I mean time efficient gardening. I was turning the front yard of my east Austin house into a food forest/garden and I was trying to find productive plants that could tolerate our crazy Texas summers… HOT, drought, flood.. and then our erratic central Texas winters, with minimal effort on my part. So, I was curious about edible native plants and what the Native American’s in our region used. After thumbing through a nice fat ethnobotany book I learned the native yaupon holly contained caffeine and it was the only caffeine producing plant native to anywhere in N. America. It also contains theobromine, the pleasure molecule in cacao/dark chocolate. Woah. Caffeine’s the most popular drug in the world and the theobromine in cacao is up there as well. I figured it must taste awful, but went about foraging some and was really surprised… It’s delicious. It tastes like good tea with zero tannins and why isn’t anyone doing anything with this? I sat on the idea for awhile and would talk to friends about it here and there. I was interested in starting a business about it, but I didn’t have money and all the other stuff that life keeps you busy with. Before we were business partners I was already good friends with John Seibold and we spent a lot of time out along the Colorado river foraging Mustang Grapes and the native Dewberries to make wine and mead. Heidi Watcher, our other business partner and I were starting to date at the time and she would go forage with us as well. I made some yaupon tea for them and then one day, probably deep into our cups over some homemade dewberry mead, I talked the two of them into starting a business with me foraging yaupon from wild land and making a product out of it.
We all put in less than $200 to get all our initial paperwork, website, etc. set up. Started doing pop up markets, mostly east Austin Witches Markets (Thank you Jessica!) Then we started focusing on farmers markets and getting the word out. We haven’t taken any investment money, so it’s been a slow slog, but we control the entire vision, we’re not beholden to anyone else and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Jason, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We make tea from the native yaupon holly, yaupon is the only caffeinated plant native to North America. We forage almost all of our yaupon from areas where removing it helps restore wildlife habitat, so it’s all regenerative agriculture. We go out into forested areas or future forested areas and leave them in better shape than when we arrived. For example we’ve been harvesting on one particular property for about 10 years. When we first arrived it had been burned by the Bastrop Complex Fire (most damaging wildfire in Texas history) a few years previous. Only a few of the big pine trees remained and most of the 10 acres had turned into a 15-20′ tall yaupon thicket. As we harvest yaupon we cut it to the ground (it grows right back) and we were finding baby pine trees. They had sprouted right after the fire, but now were totally engulf in towering yaupon thickets and were probably going to die from just being shaded out. Now those pines trees are all 15′ or so tall and will soon be tall enough to start shading out some of the yaupon, letting other native plants take some space from them and we just sped up the forest succession timeline by probably a few hundred years, at least for that little 10 acres.
We also help property owners out here that are working on wildlife habitat plan for the critically endangered Houston Toad. The owners can get a wildlife ag property tax break for habitat restoration, and a large part of that is often thinning/removing yaupon to create more biodiversity. People often snark that it’s a lot of effort/hassle for “just a toad” and they’re missing the point that amphibians, like the Houston Toad, are indicator species for the environment. They’re the canary in the coal mine. When your amphibians are dying, you know you’ve got a problem.
From the yaupon we harvest we create a light roast and a dark roast. The light roast is very green tea/yerba mate had a baby kind of flavor. The dark roast is much closer to a bold, roasty, oaky, black tea. We do both of these flavors in loose leaf and tea bags. We also make some yaupon tea concentrates that are wildly popular at the farmers markets. We use real fruit juices, no preservatives (aside from lemon juice) and real cane sugar.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

This business was born out of DIYing, being creative and trying new things. There was no yaupon industry to speak of when we started, so there was really nobody to guide us on how to handle production, marketing, distribution, etc. We eschewed investors so we’ve had to be scrappy and pay attention to what’s working. Putting our tea out there at farmers markets and starting small has let us learn a lot about what people want, like, don’t like without making huge mistakes. So there’s been a lot of pivoting to what works. Our Basil Lemon Yaupon Tea concentrate flavor came from just trying to make something out of an abundance of basil. We had an aquaponics system (think fish powered hydroponics garden) with a 250 gallon grow bed that was just totally out of bounds with the amount of basil growing in it. We were tired of pesto… and already had so much frozen pesto put up in the freezer that I was trying to find something to do with it. So, I figured I’d try it instead of mint in our mint lemon yaupon tea. The Basil Lemon Yaupon Tea has become one of our best selling flavors.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Doing farmers markets every weekend. Attending consistently and just being in front of people. As a small business that has decided to not go the investor route, money for marketing is tough to come by. All the money we spend needs to have a pretty solid and traceable ROI. Farmers markets have been a perfect solution for us. We get to interact directly with our customers, give out samples and make money while marketing. There’s really no better marketing than face to face interaction and giving them your product in the way it’s made to be presented.

Contact Info:

• Website: lostpinesyaupontea.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/lostpinesyaupon
• Facebook: facebook.com/lostpinesyaupon
• Youtube: youtube.com/lostpinesyaupontea_drinkme