BCIT Analysis · Farm Research

Inside the Leaf: What BCIT Found in Our Young Greens

We had been growing and processing young barley, wheat and oat leaves for years when we decided to ask a simple question: what was actually happening inside the leaf as we processed it?

That question took us to the Natural Health & Food Products Research Group at the British Columbia Institute of Technology — not for generic nutrition data, but for lab analysis of our crop, processed our way.

We started with the leaf

Tea’d Greens begins with the young leaves of barley, wheat and oats, harvested while the plants are still green, then processed and dried so the whole leaf can later be infused in water. For the BCIT work, samples of our dried leaves were prepared under different processing conditions, which let the research team compare what happened as the processing changed.

What oxidation actually involves

Oxidation isn’t a single moment — it’s a stage in the process, and one we control deliberately. After the young leaf is harvested and withered to lose surface moisture, it’s rolled to break down its structure and expose more of the leaf to air. That exposure is what starts oxidation: the leaf is held under controlled conditions — time, temperature and humidity — while its colour and aroma develop. We judge how far to take it by watching those changes directly, then stop the process with low-temperature drying once the leaf is where we want it.

That's the same rolling-and-oxidation sequence used in traditional leaf tea processing — we're just applying it to a leaf nobody else is using this way.

Oxidation changed more than the colour

Anyone working with leaves can see oxidation — the colour shifts, the aroma develops, the flavour changes. What we wanted to understand was whether those visible changes were accompanied by measurable changes inside the plant material. The BCIT analysis showed that they were: across the processing trials, GABA and tryptophan were among the compounds that shifted, with higher measured levels in oxidized samples than in the green-leaf sample.

That measurement was taken on dried leaf material, not a brewed cup — so we don't use it to claim a specific effect or benefit from drinking Tea’d Greens. What it told us is narrower and, to us, still genuinely interesting: oxidation is a processing step that measurably changes the leaf, not just its colour and flavour.

Why that matters on a farm that does its own processing

Most greens brands buy a finished ingredient. We grow the crop, harvest it and make every processing decision ourselves — including how long to oxidize a given batch. The BCIT work gave us a way to connect what we were seeing in the processing room with measurable changes in the plant material, and it's part of a longer process of learning this crop: a field of young barley, wheat and oats in British Columbia becomes something else entirely once the leaf itself is what you're harvesting for.