Origins/Sourcing
Highly Experienced Tea Sourcing Experts
Supplying tea is one thing. But providing in-depth tea expertise is what delivers maximum value to tea service. Borne of over 200 years of combined sourcing experience, our tea knowledge is unrivaled. It’s a big part of what helps us continually bring customers the finest, most authentic tea products—at a price that contributes to their bottom line.
These are skills our major competitors simply cannot match—skills which money cannot buy.
Our dedicated tea sourcing team consists of professionals who specialize in specific tea-growing regions around the world. They know the people on the ground. They understand how to leverage up-to-the moment changes in local production areas. As a result, they are in a better position to safeguard supply, maintain quality levels, buy smarter, and procure the ingredients for better tea matching, or to create exciting new tea blends.
Tea Sources From All Major Tea-Producing Countries
A global tea supplier, Harris Tea Foodservice acquires product from tea-producing countries all along the equator because the climate in these regions is ideal for growing tea.
Different countries provide teas with different attributes. Our skilled buyers purchase based on factors such as astringency or briskness, color, clarity, mouth-feel, and other considerations.
Our sourcing strategy helps us maintain a continuous, high-quality and economical supply of delicious tea blends. It also gives us critical flexibility to adjust our tea supply to mitigate or take advantage of changes at the various points of origin: shifts in the political landscape; currency swings; weather-related phenomenon; and other factors.
Many of the teas we acquire are are RFA (Rain Forest Alliance) and Fair Trade Certified.
Advanced Traceability
To improve traceability, we maintain visibility over our entire supply chain from growing to processing to finished goods. What’s more, our supply chain has fewer touchpoints, which makes it easier to trace products to origin.
To ensure consistent quality, our computerized warehouse management system tracks blends from input of tea components to palletization. This enables us to better locate our finished goods inventories in case of a product recall.
As an extra measure of confidence, our quality control team tests process effectiveness with routine quality audits and mock recall exercises.
