Leaf Teas

Tea has been our core business for over a hundred years and our technical staff are highly experienced in producing, packaging and selling tea and tea-related products. With laboratory, pilot plant and factory-scale manufacturing facilities in many countries, we offer an unrivalled breadth of resources and experience to our customers.

Our ownership of tea estates in Kenya and Sri Lanka gives us the unique opportunity to begin innovating at the very point the tea starts growing. Having our technical teams working alongside the production staff in our tea estates and factories offers unique opportunities for new product and process development. We aim to deliver quality products to our customers so that the benefits of our knowledge and experience can, in turn, be passed on to our customers’ customers.

We also use accredited laboratories and acknowledged world experts in food and beverage analysis to ensure product quality meets our stringent specifications as well as those of our customers.

We supply an entire portfolio of tea and tea-related products and are always pleased to provide full details, technical specifications and samples to prospective customers. Our portfolio includes:

Black Teas

Black Leaf Tea

Finlays can supply an entire range of leaf teas blended for particular customers’ requirements. We are able to manufacture tea with specific taste, colour and leaf characteristics. These can take either the Orthodox or CTC form. We can then deliver in pure or blended form in either standard industry paper sacks or bulk bags.

Orthodox Teas

Orthodox teas are teas manufactured using the traditional method of gradually rolling leaf into smaller particles. Originally this was done laboriously by hand, but now this process has largely been mechanised. Sri Lankan teas are mainly manufactured using this method.

Orthodox Tea Processing

CTC Teas

CTC (Cut, tear, curl) is an automated method of crushing and processing leaves into granules for small grade teas. These are particularly suitable for tea bags. Our Kenyan teas are primarily manufactured in this manner:

 CTC Tea Maufacture

Green Leaf Teas

Green tea accounts for 20% of the world’s tea production. Like all tea, it is rich in dietary anti-oxidants which research has shown may be significant in reducing the incidence of cancer and arterial disease. Finlays has a factory in Sri Lanka dedicated to the manufacture of Chinese pan-fried and Japanese steam processed green tea.

Decaffeinated Teas

Finlays’ factory at Hull in the North East of England extracts caffeine from black and green leaf tea supplying both the US and European markets.