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Loose Tea Companies - Where to Buy Loose-Leaf Tea Online and In Stores

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The Best Companies From Which to Buy Quality, Affordable Loose-leaf Tea

If you have come to this page, you may be looking to buy loose tea (bulk tea that is not in tea bags), possibly shopping online, and possibly in stores. You may be wondering which companies are the best companies to order or purchase loose-leaf tea from.

This page is here to help serve as a guide to give you some useful advice about buying tea, and also to share some of my personal experiences and recommendations of brands and companies that I like buying tea from.

I also want to point you to RateTea, an interactive website that I developed that can help you locate new teas and learn more about teas, whether you're a serious loose-leaf tea drinker, or a casual tea drinker who prefers tea bags.

Loose-leaf Tea Can Save Money!

Loose-leaf tea can be very affordable.

If you are a bargain-hunter like me, you want to locate high-quality tea at the best possible price. Some good news for you is that good loose tea can be quite cheap! If you scroll down, you will find the example of Ahmad tea, which costs around $6-8 a pound, enough for around 200 cups of tea. That's 3-4 cents a cup! And even the priciest companies have offerings that are still only costing about 20 cents a cup. When you buy loose tea, you save money because you aren't paying more for packaging, only for the tea itself.

My Favorite Loose-Leaf Tea Companies

My favorite brands and companies from which to buy loose-leaf tea.

The main place I buy loose-leaf tea is online. There are so many good tea companies to order premium-quality loose-leaf tea from that I cannot possibly do them all justice, so I am only listing my personal favorites. We start with the primarily-internet companies (although you can sometimes find these companies in stores reselling their products):

  • Upton Tea Imports - Upton Tea Imports has a staggeringly large catalogue that spans teas of all styles from all major tea-producing regions of the world. However, Upton tends to focus on (and in my opinion, do best with) teas from India and China, especially black teas from the Assam and Darjeeling regions of India. Upton offers small sample sizes which are quite affordable, and I find their prices to be fair across-the-board. Upton exclusively sells loose-leaf tea.

  • Rishi Tea - A few notches up from Upton in price, Rishi Tea offers loose-leaf teas that are both exceptional in quality and often unique, quite unlike teas of similar styles offered by other companies. Rishi is also a leader in sustainability, with a large portion of their teas both organic and fair-trade certified; Rishi also has gone above and beyond in their efforts to protect the environment and promote human rights causes such as education in the areas where their teas are produced. Rishi also sells only loose-leaf tea.

  • Life in Teacup - While the other two companies highlighted here are large, well-known tea companies, Life in Teacup is not. Run by Gingko Seto, this company is a tiny operation, focusing on artisan teas of the Chinese tradition, mostly from China. Life in Teacup also sells only loose-leaf tea, and sells certain teas that can be very hard to find elsewhere; some of the teas I've sampled from this company have been among the best teas I have ever tried.

Brands of Loose-Leaf Tea in Retail Stores

My favorite two brands of loose-leaf tea available in retail stores.

I occasionally buy loose-leaf tea in stores. Most small specialty tea shops only sell their own brand, or sell bulk loose tea that is not branded. However, some Asian and Middle-Eastern markets also sell certain brands. In these markets, there are a few companies and brands that I look for:

  • Foojoy Tea - Foojoy is a brand of Chinese tea best known for its inexpensive tea bags, which offer surprising quality for their price. However, Foojoy also carries two lines of loose-leaf tea of quite high quality. The higher-grade line of these two is found in round canisters, and the more inexpensive one (which is still quite good) comes in square tins.

  • Ahmad Tea - Ahmad is the most popular brand of tea in Iran, but it is actually a British company, based in London. Ahmad sells both tea bags and loose-leaf tea, and its loose-leaf offers black tea of very high quality at exceptionally reasonable prices. Personally, I am most a fan of their Kalami Assam Indian Tea, and their Ceylon Tea OPA.

Do you buy loose-leaf tea?

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Basic Advice: Buying Tea Online

Tips on Comparison Shopping, Reading Reviews, and Tea Prices

Buying tea online is the best way for most people to purchase loose-leaf tea. Many companies only sell their tea online. There are a few general pieces of advice to help make sure you make the best choices, especially if you are ordering tea for the first time. Here are a few tips:


  • Check and search review sites and tea blogs (you can find a ton of tea blogs starting from my tea blog if interested) to get a sense of a company's legitimacy before ordering from them. While different people have different tastes, this step is important to establishing a company's legitimacy.

  • Shop around and compare prices. Often, different companies sell the same tea for vastly different prices, and you want to avoid getting ripped off. But if a price is too low, it may be a sign that a company is trying to pass off a low-quality product as something higher-quality. Keep in mind that it's normal to pay a premium for organic and fair-trade certification.

  • Buy only from companies that sell by weight and clearly identify weights of tea being sold.

  • Buy only from companies that offer small, affordable sample sizes, and order samples the first time ordering. This ensures that you don't get stuck paying a lot of money for a tea that you don't like. The best companies know that the quality of their tea speaks for itself, and price their samples reasonably because they know they will draw new customers in this way.

Suggest your own tea companies to buy from:

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Questions? Comments? Feedback? Suggestions?

Share your thoughts on this page!

  • krystikercher Jan 4, 2012 @ 7:02 pm | delete
    Thanks for sharing all of this great information on where to buy loose-leaf tea with us! I'm going to link to your lens on the sidebar of my delicious-holiday-gifts-from-zazzle lens.
  • ratetea Jan 25, 2012 @ 1:09 pm | delete
    Thanks much!
  • Ramkitten Dec 8, 2011 @ 10:24 am | delete
    I'm not a tea connoiseur (and don't even know for sure how to spell that :-) ), but I think I know a really good lens when I see one. If I were looking for loose leaf tea or needed buying advice, this would be very helpful. Well done. *Blessed* (Now back to sipping my hot cocoa.)
  • ratetea Dec 8, 2011 @ 10:41 am | delete
    Thanks much, and I do love cocoa too. I think you were impressively close on the spelling too, you just need to add one more "s". I always have to look up / spell-check that word, it's definitely not one I know either. =)
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ratetea

I'm Alex Zorach; I run RateTea, where people can rate and review teas.

I'm passionate about sustainability, and preserving and protecting the earth's... more »

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