U.P. man works to uplift tea farmers in India through 1st-of-its-kind enterprise
MARQUETTE, Mich. (WJMN) – How do you create change on a global scale? For Raj Vable and his wife Mitra, their business, Young Mountain Tea, aims to revolutionize India’s tea industry. We talked with Raj Vable who says their model is, “moving at the speed of trust.”
Raj Vable was born and raised in Houghton and went to college downstate before moving to Oregon for his Master’s Degree. He started Young Mountain in 2013. His wife Mitra is the Creative Design Director behind the business, and today they are growing the business together.
He says his parents, who still live in Houghton, have been two of his biggest supporters since the very beginning.
“My mom was very proudly our very first customer. She’s also has been an investor in the past. She helped us with a loan,” said Vable. “So, I feel really lucky to have the support of my parents. And I’ll say this, in the earlier days, it was the folks in the Keweenaw Peninsula who were the first to support us. The Keweenaw Co-op was our very first wholesale customer, and they reached out to us about it. The Marquette Co-op was a couple of years later, a very early supporter. So even though the company at that time was based on the West Coast, I think the strength of community locally has been this unspoken network or web of support that has been with me on every step of this journey. And so it feels really good to live here now again.”
The latest chapter in their story is a partnership between them and a group of farmers in the Kumaon region of India.
It is there, they have broken ground on a first-of-its-kind tea processing facility.
“That process has been very much a chance to practice what we preach about this idea of listening and then acting and the farmers themselves, said Young Mountain Tea Founder, Raj Vable. “When we began this work about three years ago, we’re not formally organized into any kind of group at all. This is a different region than we had previously work where there aren’t co-ops, there aren’t even sort of legal entities to represent the farmers. So, our goal is to figure out how do you organize farmers, especially from my position, living here in Michigan and this is the other side of the world. The approach is to go through local partnerships.”
In addition to growing an independent source of income for the farmers, the idea is to develop their personal sense of independence. They have developed relationships to create farmer training partners.
“In one village, when we started, the farmers didn’t know how much tea is growing on their land because previously the government had organized the collection of the tea leaf and the removal,” Vable continued, “So we’re setting up a processing facility that we co-own with this farmer group and want to understand, you know, we’re going to pay you five times the commodity prices for this tea. So, let’s figure out how much money that is going to look like into your pockets. But we couldn’t figure that out if we don’t know how much to grow. The first step was to work with them to develop just simple recordkeeping.”
The new Kumaon tea factory is designed to meet American and European food safety standards. Something Vable said has not been done before.
“It’s kind of shocking. But the farmer ownership piece, as well as the higher end machinery that are thinking about international food safety compliances. That hasn’t been done. And so we’ve had a tremendous amount of interest even before the thing is up and running, which I feel really excited by, because there’s a need for it,” said Vable.
He says once the facility is up and running, the hope is to replicate it across the region. A larger goal is to have the practice spread to other areas of global agriculture through shared ownership and investments in improving quality. Vable said it would create sustainable livelihoods that, “will not only empower the farmers but lead to better food for us.”
Vable is working to grow a better quality of tea.
“What we’re doing is working with farmers to diversify what they grow. So it’s not just cheap black tea for tea bags, but these are higher end teas. And when I say higher end, what that means is going to a higher elevation. The tea plant, when it’s grown up in the 4 to 6000 foot above sea level range, the stresses environmentally on the plant force it to put more compounds into the parts of the plant that we drink. And those additional compounds are actually what gave it not only its flavors but its health benefits. So that’s one part of the elevation. The second part is a specific cultivar of the tea plant that we select. So just like with wine, there’s a huge number of vines that have been sort of bred over centuries. The same is true for tea. We’ve got some of what are called the elite colonials from Darjeeling, India’s most prized tea region, growing in new soils. And they’ve done really well there,” said Vable.
Another specific practice of Young Mountain is to harvest only the youngest part of the plant. Where farmers would traditionally get paid by the pound, Vable said a lot of what would be harvested was considered bulk filler. By only picking the first bud and two believes, a higher quality of tea is produced.
“When I say quality, that takes a lot of forms. It generally needs to have a lot more depth. There’s a lot more richness and complexity to the teas because of all these things we just mentioned. There’s a lot more floral characteristics. There’s a sweeter, more buttery, creamy mouthfeel the way the tea coats the tongue. And after you’ve drunk it, there’s this glow. The finish lasts in a way that especially if you exhale to your nose after drinking these teas, you get this like wash of aroma that just coats you in this pleasant feel,” added Vable.
Today, Young Mountain has 23 teas, sourced from five regions of India and Nepal. They are all single origin teas, meaning that they aren’t blended or flavored. The tea bags themselves are also compostable.
You can learn more about Young Mountain Tea and where to purchase it, here.
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