Fair Trade News

published Nov 30, 2005

Rankin's Choice Organic Teas in Seattle is first U.S. company to use fair trade tea

by Steve Wilhelm
Staff Writer

Blake Rankin keeps following his ethics and his interests, which almost to his surprise have led him to be president of one of the nation's most progressive tea packers.

Choice Organic Teas was the first in the United States to exclusively pack organic tea, as well as the first tea company to base much of its sales and production on the fair trade movement. Rankin is also pushing the environmental envelope, packing his tea in hemp-based tea bags and recycled-material boxes, and basing his company on an array of environmentally conscious programs.

Now Rankin's Seattle company, Granum Inc., which primarily does business as Choice Organic Teas, is growing at 20 percent a year and generates between $5 million and $10 million in annual revenues. It's expanding so fast that Rankin is looking for a new facility to replace the 18,000-square-foot space he moved into just five years ago.

"We're profitable beyond my wildest dreams," he said.

But to Maya Spaull, tea accounts manager for TransFair USA in Oakland, Calif., the nation's only third-party certifier of fair trade practices, Rankin is a more than a successful businessman. He's a compassionate pioneer who initiated the idea of tea importers operating under the "fair trade" model, after the idea already had been broached by the coffee industry.

"He is a benevolent person, with so much experience in the tea industry," she said. "To take charge as a leader and work with a social certification system as fair trade early on, demonstrates the values of Blake and the values of the company, that they initiated this kind of interest in social certification."

Rankin may be socially progressive but he also has a sense of heritage. Most of his company's production is a line of about 70 traditional black tea and green tea blends, including Earl Grey, chai, and jasmine green tea. He doesn't like the plethora of quirky market-driven tea blends that have flooded the market in recent years, even if they do sell well.

"We are driven by what I want to do, rather than by what the market wants," he said.

This sense of independence has characterized Rankin, 57, for his entire adult life.

His first foray into the wholesale food business was as a student in 1969, when he and a group of compatriots were occupying the student union building at the University of California, Los Angeles, protesting the war in Vietnam. Spirits were high but the food was grim, just white bread and peanut butter. Rankin thought he could do better for the group, so he collected $50, bought 50 pounds of brown rice and a gallon of soy sauce, and several hours later all the demonstrators were eating hot brown rice and vegetables.

After graduating, the natural thing seemed to be to open a natural foods store, which he and a bunch of friends did in Canada. But then he got restless, moved to Seattle and with a bunch of friends opened a food distributor they called Janus. But then he got restless, again, handed over his shares in the store, and took off for Japan, which was the origin of much of the macrobiotic brown-rice-and-miso food thinking of the time.

Actually he balked halfway through the flight across the Pacific -- and got off the plane during a stop on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. There he became manager of an organic food store, but after six months he got restless and continued his journey to Japan. By that time he had been given a job, to develop direct sourcing for Janus, and in Japan he found sort of a second home.

"I spent six months touring all over Japan, seeing traditional food products, factories, shops, that don't exist anymore," he said. He returned to Japan in 1976 and spent two years in Tokyo, studying Zen Buddhism, and learning about Japan's food culture.

By 1980 he had returned to Seattle with an advance of $1,500 in food products from a Japanese distributor with whom he'd become friends, and quickly sold it into Seattle's budding natural foods retail movement. Soon he created Granum Inc. as a natural foods distributor, but always with a sense of nonattachment.

"Keep it simple, Blake," he told himself. "Don't get carried away, you're not a business person."

At that time, the Japanese yen was so strong versus the dollar that importing from Japan made little financial sense, so Rankin decided to travel around the world to look for organic tea suppliers. Anyway, he was getting restless.

"I thought there was room for organic products, nobody had done that in the U.S.," he remembers.

He found organic tea plantations in Sri Lanka and India, and in 1989 he launched Choice, the nation's first exclusively organic tea company.

Then in 1995 he really tied the knot, when he decided to buy his own tea bag-packing machine rather than pay a Los Angeles co-packer $100,000 every year for the service.

He bought his first used Italian machine in Poland for $250,000, then another, then a third. He'll soon take delivery of the fourth IMA-brand machine from the same maker, this one brand new. The machines seem anomalous making something as ephemeral as tea bags; they are busy, clanking devices that fold the bags, fill them with tea and seal them, then attach the string and tiny tag that consumers use to dunk the bags.

Rankin's initiatives in recent years, in addition to packing organic teas in a highly environmental manner, have been to find ways to support the people who work on the tea plantations.

Since he's traveled the world so much and visited so many plantations, he's highly aware of the difficult lives of plantation workers, many of whom live in a world circumscribed by plantation boundaries.

Early on, Rankin's company tried to find a way to funnel some money directly back to those workers, but it became difficult to audit and raised questions about who decided what would be done with the money. That's why he jumped onto the fair trade movement, when it sprang up from the coffee-roasting industry.

A feature of fair-trade funding is that workers form democratically run collectives that decide what to do with the proceeds, which simultaneously meets their real needs and empowers them vis-à-vis the plantation owners.

"It's a wonderful way for us to run our business and funnel money back to laborers and know they control it," he said. "All of India, Sir Lanka, South Africa, and 95 percent of China, is free trade."