United States
A marginal grower with a long history of trying. Repeated nineteenth-century attempts to establish tea in the South mostly failed on labour costs; what survives at scale is a single mechanised garden on Wadmalaw Island in South Carolina, alongside a genuinely artisan sector on the slopes of Hawai‘i’s Big Island and a scatter of small farms in the Pacific North-West and the Gulf states. The Hawaiian growers are the interesting case: small plots, hand-processing and a deliberate focus on speciality rather than volume.
History on this page: TeaHQ synthesis
TeaHQ's own reading of well-attested general knowledge, with no single source behind it.
This country’s description dates the establishment or the collapse of an industry. The label says on what basis — it governs the historical statements, not the production figures below, which carry their own definitions and sources.
Production, trade and price
| Measure | Year | Value | Basis | Published by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Import value | 2023 | 519,785,000 USD | FAOSTAT TCL element 'Import value' for item 667 / CPC 01620 'Tea leaves'. FAO publishes this in thousands of US dollars; TeaHQ scales it to whole US dollars, an exact conversion. Customs valuation practice for imports varies between countries. FAOSTAT flags this cell A, an official figure reported by the country. Published as 519,785 thousand USD. | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Statistics Division |
| Imports | 2023 | 104,225 t | FAOSTAT TCL element 'Import quantity' for item 667 / CPC 01620 'Tea leaves', in tonnes of MADE TEA. Includes tea imported for re-export, which is why entrepôt economies appear larger than their drinking population would suggest. FAOSTAT flags this cell A, an official figure reported by the country. | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Statistics Division |
Figures are reproduced as their publisher stated them and are not converted, averaged or ranked. Where two publishers disagree, both rows appear — this comes from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Statistics Division. The largest single trap in tea statistics is that FAO’s series counts green leaf as plucked while national tea boards count finished made tea, and the two differ by roughly a factor of four and a half. The basis column says which each row is, and a figure without it is not comparable to one with it.
How production is organised
Owner-operated farms, and the labour arithmetic is the whole story. American wages make hand-plucking impossible at commodity prices, so the country's two viable models are full mechanisation on flat ground or very small hand-worked plots selling at speciality prices. There is no middle, which is why there is no American tea industry between one machine-harvested garden and a few dozen smallholdings.
How firm this is: Inferred by TeaHQ from general knowledge of the trade rather than taken from a source that states it.
What it produces
A small mechanised black-tea operation in South Carolina plus a dispersed artisan sector, most established in Hawai‘i, making green, white, oolong and black tea in very small quantities.
How firm this is: Inferred by TeaHQ from general knowledge of the trade rather than taken from a source that states it. The structure is well attested; the number of active growers changes constantly and no figure is recorded here.
Growing regions in United States
Named districts with their own elevation, climate and character. Elevation figures are recorded as ranges because sources disagree on where a district begins and ends.
This country in the chronology
Events on TeaHQ’s timeline that happened here or turned on this country. Each carries its date together with what kind of date it is.
- 16 December 1773 — The Boston Tea Party
- Recipes from the mid-nineteenth century; the fair was in 1904 — Iced tea and the 1904 World's Fair
- From the 1880s through the interwar period — The tea room as somewhere a woman could sit down alone
- Patented 1903; the Sullivan story is set around 1908 — Where the tea bag actually came from
Teas from United States
Guides covering this origin
- The other tea destructions, and what Boston is standing in for — Tea consigned under the Act of 1773 was refused, returned, seized, stored, burned or dumped in several colonial ports. Boston is the one everybody knows because it was the one Parliament punished, not because it was the only one.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
Everything on this page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis of widely-attested trade and production background. No external document stands behind it, which is why the statements here describe practice rather than assert measurements.