Finding purpose in every cup
The founders of Numi Organic Tea wanted more than a successful company — so they built a business steeped in environmental awareness
The founders of Numi Organic Tea of Oakland estimate that they’ve lost millions over the years by following their principles and staying away from packaging materials that are harmful to the environment, in favor of natural or recyclable counterparts. Their goal is to build a responsible business, not just a successful one, and their sacrifices have not impeded them from enjoying worldwide recognition.
Numi Organic Tea was formed in 1999 out of a 750-square-foot apartment, and today it is an international company known for its fine, natural flavors of tea. Numi’s owners, siblings Reem Rahim Hassani and Ahmed Rahim, have grown it into a multimillion-dollar international business, with products distributed in more than 50 countries. In Oakland, Sept. 27 was officially declared “Numi Day,” in honor of Numi Tea.
In 2012, Ahmed co-founded OSC2, One Step Closer to an Organic Sustainable Community, a national network of consumer packaged goods business owners who jointly committed to reducing the use of petroleum-based products. In keeping with this vow, Numi uses recyclable cardboard, soy-based inks and biodegradable filter paper tea bags, and avoids cheaper, plastic counterparts.
The name Numi comes from a dried lime-based drink, which Ahmed and Reem drank as children in their native Iraq. Their teas are sourced from organic farms all over the world. Nearly all of the company’s products are fair trade or fair labor certified. The company also started its own foundation, which funds Together for H2OPE, an organization dedicated to providing clean, safe drinking water to impoverished communities around the globe.
QCommitting to reducing plastic seems like a difficult choice. Has it been hard to turn down cheaper alternatives and commit to something that costs your company more?
AHMED >> It’s not hard, it’s actually really easy if you just commit. It’s as simple as saying “no,” and having the discipline to follow up. Luckily, it’s becoming more and more popular. When Starbucks says, “We’re not using plastic straws,” or Mcdonald’s says, “We’re not using Styrofoam for our burgers,” it becomes more of a movement.
REEM >> It has to be part of the business model. You can call it a financial sacrifice, or you can call it an investment. For us, it’s been millions of dollars if we didn’t go that route. We could have been making a lot more money, but we chose instead to focus on quality, and focus on the Earth, and our farmers. Focusing on people and purity was actually more important to us, so we can sleep soundly at night knowing that our consumers have a good cup of tea and don’t have pesticides in our cup.
QYour website says Numi is a “different” kind of company. How so, and how do you maintain that?
REEM >> Our sustainability efforts set us apart as an environmentally sustainable brand. We really care about equitable wages and fair wages for our workers around the world. Our packaging is recyclable and pretty much all plant-based at this point. It’s about making sure our impact on the Earth is very low and being thoughtful about our choices in that way, as well as being thoughtful about our supply chain and making sure we are taking care of people. Plus, on top of our tea company we created the Numi Foundation, which has three main pillars: providing clean, safe drinking water to our farmers; providing art, gardening and social studies curriculums for Oakland schools that don’t have them; and providing summer school for children in Iraq who are at risk for dropping out of school.
QHow do you go about building an international network of farmers to support your business?
AHMED >> We source about 125 ingredients from 36 countries, and it’s not easy because we have a lot of criteria, from being 100% organic to really working with farmers and stakeholders who really care about the well-being of their workers. It’s a lot of due diligence to go to countries of origin to evaluate who will be the best farmers for our herbs, spices and tea. It takes a lot of different steps in evaluating quality and their standards and values, and really their supply needs and our growth needs. And also, with an agricultural product, the nuances of exporting and documentation for organics and fair trade and all kinds of safety, it’s not that simple. You have to find farmers who understand what regulations there are, from distribution to regulatory in different countries. It takes a lot of due diligence on all these different levels.
We definitely planted the seeds early on, but over the years it’s become more robust and better managed. Early on, there was a lot of building trust with the farmers. Now, 20 years later, a lot of our farmers are still the same people.
QYou say in your bios that you got into this business because you thought there wasn’t a lot of diversity in tea. Why is that? What factors limit the industry’s ability to be diverse?
AHMED >> Well, I guess I would say it’s just taking risks. A lot of people don’t want to; it’s very easy to create another Earl Grey tea, it doesn’t take a lot of creativity to do that. We are not risk-averse; there are a lot of unique herbs we’ve pioneered. It took an ability to believe in better, take a chance and know what the consumer is looking for. I think the market is expanding and people want new stuff. I think America is a great place for experiments, and I think a lot of bigger companies don’t have that risk appetite to try unique herbs that nobody knows of. It might have changed now, but 20 years ago that just wasn’t there. That allowed us to pioneer new stuff.
REEM >> The Bay Area is the place to be, because it is so open to new things and the diversity, acceptance and tolerance is at such a great level. You can try anything here, really, and get a following if you strike the right chord. I think we were able to do that with 1) quality, 2) organics, 3) new and interesting herbs, and then the fourth was our packaging. And once people tried the tea, they were hooked. We don’t use flavoring; it’s all real ingredients, and much more clean and natural.
QWhat are the challenges in the tea industry? Looking back over the past 20 years, what would you do differently?
AHMED >> It turns out there is not as much brand loyalty in the tea industry. In the beginning, we were focused on creating an emotional connection with the customer, where a lot of the big corporations, all they do is push price, push price, push price. They might not have as much of an authentic story, but that doesn’t matter when someone wants to buy a cheap box of tea. We have all these sustainable initiatives, but it’s a price to pay. I think that’s where the rubber meets the road: differentiating yourself and communicating that well, so the person will want to vote with their dollars and make that choice.
With tea, people will switch brands. We just have to give them a real reason to believe, and now we’re actually doing that: We’re changing our focus on how we want the consumer to be more activated and make choices, not just with why they buy Numi but why they do anything. We call it “activating purpose” and keeping it real and making a difference.
REEM >> We’ve learned that tea consumers are not really loyal to a brand, so that makes it even more important to make an emotional connection quicker and faster. Tea consumers have a number of brands in their cupboard and they switch types and flavors depending on their mood and other considerations. And the Numi flavors tend to be that much more experimental.