Value-Added Canadian Agriculture

Why Growing and Processing Our Own Greens Matters

Tea’d Greens™ starts as a crop, not a purchased ingredient. We grow young barley, wheat and oat leaves on our farm in Bridesville, British Columbia, then carry out the key processing steps on the same property.

That vertical integration is one of the strongest things we can say about the brand because it is concrete. We know where the young greens were grown, when they were harvested, how they were handled and where they were processed.

We start with the field

Young barley, wheat and oat leaves are the foundation of every dry Tea’d Greens blend. We manage the crop on our own land rather than purchasing finished dried leaves from a commodity supplier.

Growing the base ingredient ourselves lets us make decisions around seeding, irrigation, harvest timing and field handling with the finished infusion in mind.

Harvest timing shapes the ingredient

We harvest the cereal plants for their young leaves, before our production crop is allowed to mature into grain. At that stage we are working with flexible green leaf material that can be processed into a steepable whole-leaf format.

Because the processing building is on the farm, the harvested material does not need to travel to a distant facility before the next production step begins.

Processing happens here too

After harvest, the leaves move through our on-farm process before being dried and prepared for blending. Depending on the finished blend, we combine the young greens with ingredients such as mint, chamomile, hibiscus, rose hips, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, bergamot oil and roasted orange peel.

The dry infusions are then prepared in loose-leaf formats or pyramid sachets and packaged for sale.

Why vertical integration matters for a small brand

• Traceability: the base greens come from our own farm.
• Fewer hand-offs: growing, harvesting and key processing stages stay under one operation.
• Product development: we can test harvest timing and processing decisions using our own crop.
• Canadian value creation: we are turning a Canadian-grown agricultural crop into a finished consumer beverage product in British Columbia.

What “farm-to-cup” means to us

Farm-to-cup is not intended as a vague lifestyle phrase. It describes the physical chain behind the product: seed, field, young leaf, harvest, on-farm processing, blending, packaging and finally the cup.

That chain is what we want customers to understand when they first encounter Tea’d Greens. The product may be unfamiliar, but its origin is not mysterious.