1. Dorje Teas

Run by 23-year-old Sparsh Agarwal, the artisanal tea comes from the 150-year-old Selim Hill Tea Garden, spread across a vast 973 acres.

When COVID-19 brought a sudden halt to business, Sparsh and his friends revived his family’s tea garden through a unique subscription model. This model ensures that customers can avail of all four flushes of teas at premium quality and affordable rates. Buy here.

2. Kolkata Chai Co

Brothers Ani and Ayan reminisce about the tea that they grew up having on the roads of Kolkata, their hometown.

So when they moved across the world to Massachusetts, they decided to give the United States a taste of chai with their brand the Kolkata Chai Co. The brand ensures “culture and traditions are represented accurately and honestly” through its blends of masala chai, premixes and more.

3. Gardner Street Tea

Rashi Sanghvi was quick to note that while the Indian market was making a shift to ‘healthier’ teas they were compromising on quality.

She found that teabags were often bleached or opaque, rendering the product inside useless. With a plan to introduce an experimental tea brand that would blend the best quality leaves with fruits, flowers, and herbs, Rashi launched Gardner Street Tea. Buy here. 

4. No. 3 Clive Road

India’s synonymy with chai is well known, but apart from a few local brands, tea from here isn’t recognised globally, thought Delhi’s Radhika Chopra.

Her brand strays away from the usual tea flavours and offers Wildflower Green tea, the Jaipur blend, the Jodhpur blend, and even a mystery blend that boasts of vanilla, juniper berries, and ginger. Buy here.

5. The Hillcart Tales

The artisanal tea brand was born in the 1800s, helmed by a man named Ashutosh Ghosh, then a civil contractor.

Once a purchasing agent for Harrison & Crossfield, one of the largest tea houses of the time, Ghosh set up an outlet ‘Hillcart Tales’ on Harrison Road, Calcutta (Kolkata). He began sourcing and blending teas here. Hillcart Tales has been in existence for over 120 years now, and as the brand boasts, they continue to be picky with the quality of the leaves. Buy here.

6. My Chai Diaries

Ami Bhansali was studying at  New York Business School in 2010, when one project required her to brainstorm on a business model. She thought a chai venture seemed like the perfect idea.

In an attempt to use her degree knowledge and couple it with her own love for tea, Chai Diaries was launched in 2011. “At the end of the day, we sell tea — fresh, delicious camellia sinensis leaves, blended with fruits and botanicals,” she writes. Buy here. 

7. Aromica Tea

Assam entrepreneur Ranjit Baruah’s work in a tea company highlighted a ground reality — that the growers rarely had any proper channels for selling their high-quality organic tea.

With the vision to empower these farmers, Ranjit and his wife Dolly Sharma Baruah brought them under one umbrella — Aromica Tea, a brand launched in October 2018. Under their banner, they have launched over 26 blends of different types of handcrafted teas and their hit favourite continues to be blue pea tea made using the blue pea flower. Buy here.

8. Tulsi Tea

The brand had humble beginnings in the form of a kirana (grocery) shop in Gujarat’s Amreli district managed by Haresh Kathrotiya’s father.

In 1997, he had to abandon his college degree and take on the business when his dad fell ill. This was when he decided to brew an idea and start a tea business. Since 1999, Tulsi Tea has been giving Gujarat a taste of its chai patti and is now a multi-crore business. Buy here. 

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