Where the Price of Your Tea Is Decided: The Mombasa Auction — Epoche A2
Purpose This report follows one lot of black tea from a factory near Kericho, in the Kenyan highlands, to the auction room in Mombasa, where buyers meet every week and set the price of a great deal of the world's black tea. The process Pickers carry green leaf to the factory the same day. Several kilos of green leaf make one kilo of dry tea. The factory dries, cuts and sorts the tea, packs it in sacks, and sends small samples to Mombasa before the sale. In the tasting room, buyers pour, smell and taste. They take the tea in with a loud slurp, so it reaches the whole mouth, and then spit it out. On auction day the lot is called. Buyers bid in the room, the sale is closed, and the price is written down. The factory is paid at that price, and that price decides what a picker's kilo of green leaf is worth this season. Finding Many people believe the supermarket sets the price of tea. It does not. It buys from a company that bought in that room. The price is made where the tea is tasted, not where it is drunk — and a farmer who has never seen the sea is paid by a slurp in Mombasa.