La Tea Bar is a tiny café in Denver, Colorado that serves a wide range of single garden teas, a few coffees, and a selection of pastries, sandwiches and salads. Kazi Anis Ahmed and Linda Appel Lipsius, co-founders of Teatulia, are working on sustainability in a variety of contexts.
La tea they serve, Teavana, is sourced from a single natural and organic garden in Bangladesh. Much like single-origin coffee or single-estate wine, this means that Teavana has control over every part of the growing process, and can ensure the quality and practices involved in growing and harvesting the tea.
Single garden also means that the tea leaves are plucked and made into tea before being shipped to the United States where they are packaged. Many other teas are made by blending multiple tea leaves from different gardens and the different processes towards making the packaged tea that ends up in your cup occur in several different places. This garden is also one of the largest USDA certified organic gardens in the world, and the only USDA certified organic garden in Northern Bangladesh’s Tetulia region.
The fertilizer for the garden comes from a cattle cooperative program that Teavana created with the local women. Teavana loans cows to the local women who, in exchange, take care of the cows, get the fresh milk and keep the offspring. Once the loan is paid off, the women can keep the cow and continue to make money from it, enabling them to send their children to school and create better lives for themselves.
It has also been found that this 2,000 acre tea garden is not only boosting the local economy, but restoring the local ecosystem. According to the Teatulia website, sustainability in practice means:
“The use of farming practices that not only do no harm to the environment, but actually help it flourish as evidenced by the total regeneration of the ecosystem at our garden, and employment of social practices that empower all of the people working in our garden and our community at large while giving them tools to better their lives such as the Teatulia Cooperative (cattle-lending program and farming program), health and education programs and the appointment of women managers in the garden.”
The Tea Bar supports the local community by serving coffee from a small-batch roaster in Denver and food from local bakeries and shops. They also give back to the community by participating in local events, such as the recent Colorado Gives Day, in which the Tea Bar donated 10 percent of the sales from December 10th to Denver Kids, Inc., an organization that supports students in the Denver school system.
The Tea Bar is located in between the mama ‘hood, a store and community resource for the prenatal and postnatal needs of families, and the Green Garage, an eco-friendly car repair shop, all housed within the Zuni Hub building. The building has two solar array systems and uses motion sensitive lights, recycled materials and low VOC paint.
The Tea Bar is the only place where you can get Teatulia’s tea sodas and drinks made for you, but you can buy them on the Teatulia website. The tea canisters are made from post-consumer paper, printed with water-based inks, and the pyramid tea bags are made of compostable corn silk, while the individually wrapped bags are made from eucalyptus and aspen fibre.
Read about another Colorado-based sustainable business in Green business role model follows its folly to success>>
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Abbie Mood
image : Tea Bar
