Indian tea industry: A new management flavour, thanks to small growers by Faizal Khan October 02, 2021
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/trends/features/indian-tea-industry-a-new-management-flavour-thanks-to-small-growers-7534081.html
Owned and operated by farmers, the Grassroots Tea Corporation could transform the lives of over 2.5 lakh small tea growers in India.
many of Assam's small tea growers who depended on the market's demand-supply dynamics today no longer need to lean on big tea factories for selling their crop. A new tea corporation where small growers are stakeholders, from cultivating to manufacturing to marketing, is changing the way the tea industry works.
In the new model, small growers - farmers who own between half-bigha (.3 acres) and ten bighas (3.3 acres) - collectively set up tea producer companies that buy their green leaf and process it into tea in its manufacturing units. The "made tea", or ready-to-brew tea, is then packaged and marketed by the corporation in wholesale and retail.
"The tea market is an entrenched system of auction houses, brokers and buyers at the national and global level. We thought there should be a system by which we should aggregate the product and sell in a professional manner," explains John. "A corporation becomes a common aggregator selling it under a common brand," John adds.