HEAR THE HEADLINES – Bottled Tea is Bouncing Back | Honest Tea Co-Founder Seth Goldman Will Launch a Rival Tea Brand | Tea Parcels Contribute to Record Carrier Volume
| GUEST – Suzette Hammond, tea educator and founder of Chicago-based Being Tea
| FEATURE INTRO: This week Tea Biz correspondent Jessica Natale Woollard travels to Chicago, where Suzette Hammond, founder of the Being Tea school, describes an expanded eight-month course on how to be a brilliant tea educator. Hammond recognized a gap in tea training: tea professionals are not taught how to teach how to deliver meaningful programs in a small group or one-on-one.
Teaching the Tea Teachers – Small business owners are a large percentage of Suzette Hammond's students. Tamina Monchi, who is the founder of Mythaga tea in Nairobi, Kenya, is someone who came to the program as a certified tea sommelier, one of the first in East Africa. So she has a really deep tea background; a lot of it was in field research and understanding tea cultivation, says Hammond. She didn't intend to create a small tea business, but it just kind of happened in the pandemic. "I remember her saying to me that when she was getting started, it hadn't occurred to her how important education would be, how in order to actually sell the tea that she would have to train people. It was something that had not come up for her. She was just so excited to make these learnings, these connections happen in real time. And so seeing that light bulb moment go off — that at every point she'd be training people — that was really awesome to see."
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