The two kinds of text on a packet
Everything printed on a tea package falls into one of two classes. Regulated fields exist because a food label has to carry them — the ingredient declaration, net quantity, a durability date, the name and address of the business responsible, and some statement of origin or of where the food was packed. Marketing fields exist because the seller chose to print them, and no authority defines any of them. The regulated fields are dull, small, usually on the back, and are the most reliable text on the packet. The marketing fields are large, on the front, and are where premium, finest, artisan, reserve, hand-picked and imperial live. Neither class is dishonest; the difference is that one is checkable and the other is not. A reader who reverses the usual attention — reading the small print first and the front last — extracts far more from the same packet. A third class sits awkwardly between them and is worth naming: fields that are voluntary but factual, such as harvest date, district, cultivar and processing detail. Nobody requires them and nobody audits them, and they are nonetheless the most informative text on a speciality packet, because a seller can only fill them in if the supply chain kept the record. Their absence on an expensive tea is therefore itself a piece of information, and it is the thing to notice once the regulated fields have been read.
The ingredient declaration
The single most informative regulated field, because ingredient lists must generally name what is in the product and list ingredients in descending order of quantity. For an unblended tea it will say something like green tea, and that is the whole point: a one-word ingredient list means leaf and nothing else. For a scented or flavoured tea it becomes decisive. Green tea and jasmine flowers is a scented tea; green tea and natural flavouring is a flavoured one; green tea, jasmine flowers and natural flavouring is a scented tea that has also been flavoured, which is common and is not visible from the front of the pack. For a fruit blend, the descending order tells you which ingredients are actually present in quantity — usually apple and hibiscus — and where the taste is really coming from, which is usually the flavouring near the end of the list. There is a further reading habit worth applying to blends, which is to check whether the tea appears first. A fruit or herbal blend that lists tea some way down is mostly not tea, and a chai whose first ingredient is cinnamon is a spice blend with tea in it. Neither is a fault, and both are frequently sold as tea products at tea prices. The declaration answers the question in a second and the front of the pack rarely answers it at all.
Net quantity, and why it is a value field
Net quantity is regulated and therefore honest, and it is the field that makes price comparison possible at all. Two things make it more useful than it appears. First, tea is sold in wildly different pack sizes across the same shelf, and per-gram prices vary by an order of magnitude between formats without the packaging making that obvious — a small handsome caddy is frequently several times the per-gram price of the same tea in a pouch. Second, for bagged tea the number of bags and the net quantity together give the weight per bag, which is a real quality signal: a bag holding around two grams and a bag holding around three grams brew very differently, and the smaller one is a decision the packer made about cost. Doing this arithmetic once for the teas in a household changes buying habits more than most tasting advice. One further arithmetic habit is worth forming for loose leaf, which is cost per cup rather than cost per hundred grams. A tea that supports four infusions from one dose costs a fraction per cup of what its shelf price suggests, and a bagged tea used once costs more per cup than its price implies. This is the calculation that makes speciality loose leaf look considerably less extravagant than it first appears, and it is entirely derivable from the net quantity field and a dosing decision.
Dates: durability, harvest and packing
Three different dates appear on tea packets and only one of them is about the leaf. A durability date, printed as best before, is a quality estimate set by the packer and is treated in full on its own page. A packing or production date tells you when the tea was put in the packet, which for a tea that sat in a warehouse for a year before packing says little. A harvest date, giving the year and ideally the season or the picking, is the one that matters for every category where freshness is part of the product, and it is much rarer. The pattern to notice is which of the three a seller chooses to print. A speciality seller who states harvest year and season is telling you they know it; a packer who prints only a two-year durability date on a green tea is telling you the tea is a commodity in their system, whatever the front of the pack says. Lot codes are the fourth date-adjacent field and are usually ignored because they are unintelligible. They are nonetheless the packer’s own identifier for a production run, which means a seller can trace a complaint or a query back through their records with it. Quoting a lot code when asking a seller about a tea is the single most effective way to get a specific answer rather than a general one, and it is printed on almost every commercially packed food.
Origin, grade and cultivar
Three fields that are voluntary, unregulated in their detail, and informative in proportion to their specificity. Origin at country level is nearly useless for a country with several tea industries — Ceylon and China both span teas that share almost nothing — and origin at district, valley, mountain or estate level is a real claim that a seller can be held to. Grade codes describe leaf size, wholeness and tip content within a system that only applies to some producing countries, and they are explained separately. Cultivar is meaningful for some teas and decorative for others, also treated separately. What all three have in common is that their presence indicates a supply chain that kept track. A packer who does not know the district cannot print it, so the field’s absence is itself information, particularly on a tea whose price implies it should be there. Elevation, plucking standard and processing notes belong in the same voluntary group and behave the same way. A packet stating that a tea was picked as bud and two leaves, steamed to a stated depth, or roasted over charcoal is making claims that a knowledgeable buyer could challenge, which is exactly what makes them worth printing. The general pattern across all of these fields is that specificity and accountability travel together, and a seller who narrows a claim has accepted a risk in order to tell you something.
The business name and address, and the country of packing
The least glamorous field and one of the more revealing. A label must generally identify the business responsible for the food, and it frequently also states where the product was packed. That address is not the origin of the tea and is not intended to be, but it tells you the shape of the operation: a company address in a consuming country on a tea described as a village production means at minimum that the tea was imported and repacked, which is entirely normal and is worth knowing. Where a label carries both a producing-country statement and a packing statement in a consuming country, the two are answering different questions. Where it carries only the packing statement, the origin has not been stated at all, and the absence is the information. There is a practical use for this field beyond interpretation. It gives you somebody to ask. A responsible business named on a label is obliged to be identifiable, and speciality importers in particular will very often answer a direct question about harvest date, garden or processing that the label does not carry. The quality of that answer — specific, hedged where uncertain, or evasive — tells a buyer more about the supply chain than any amount of front-of-pack copy, and it costs one email.
Fields that look regulated and are not
Several terms are printed in the visual style of a specification and mean nothing defined. Grade names such as ceremonial and premium are unregulated. Elevation figures are voluntary and unverified, though they are usually broadly accurate and are more common in Sri Lanka and Taiwan where elevation is a recognised trade category. Descriptions such as small-batch, single-lot, hand-processed and traditional have no standard. Even the word organic behaves differently from the rest: it is a controlled term in most major markets and may only be used with certification, so it is one of the few premium-sounding words on a packet that is actually a regulated claim. The general test is whether the word points at a body that could withdraw the right to use it. If it does not, it is a description of intent rather than of the tea. Certification marks are the important exception in the other direction and deserve to be read carefully rather than dismissed with the marketing terms. An organic, Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance mark points at a written standard, an audit and a body that can withdraw the right to use it, which makes it a checkable claim of a defined and limited scope. What each scheme actually verifies is a separate subject covered in full elsewhere in this catalogue, and the point here is only that these marks belong in the regulated column rather than beside the adjectives.
What TeaHQ does not claim here
Labelling rules differ by jurisdiction and are revised, and this page describes the general architecture of a food label rather than the law of any particular market. No specific regulation, threshold, permitted wording or exemption is asserted, and TeaHQ has not verified the current requirements in the United Kingdom, the European Union, the United States or anywhere else. Anyone relying on a specific rule — a producer designing a pack, or a buyer disputing a claim — should read the applicable regulation rather than this page. What is stated here and is not jurisdiction-specific is the reading habit: the informative fields are the ones somebody was obliged to get right, plus the voluntary ones a seller could only fill in if they knew the answer. Two further caveats. Packaging for the same product frequently differs between markets, so a tea sold in several countries may carry quite different information on each label without anything having changed in the tin. And online listings are not labels: the text on a website is marketing copy in every jurisdiction the catalogue is aware of, and the regulated fields appear on the physical pack. A buyer comparing a website description against the packet that arrives is comparing two different kinds of document.