Visit our popular shop and café in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and you may be surprised to learn that lying behind this façade, is our factory. We were one of the first companies to manufacture tea bags in the UK; and we have been making tea bags since 1967.
Today, we pack enough high quality tea, coffee and cocoa every week for 3 million cups to be enjoyed and not just in our own café and your home, but also in thousands of commercial establishments and in many companies to which we export, including Japan and America. In our manufacturing premises, we also roast around 300 tonnes of coffee every year including about 6% of the UK’s Fairtrade Organic Coffee.
Central to our tea production within the factory is the magnificent stainless steel blending wheel, manufactured by Horace Barnett (of Chesterfield Observatory fame). This metal marvel mixes the teas to the exacting palate of our chief tea taster James Pogson. We produce more than 100 million teabags a year – at a rate of approximately 600 bags a minute.
We supply more than 3,000 businesses across the UK, including cafés, hotels, restaurants, tea rooms, coffee shops, wholesalers, retailers, councils, caterers, shops, supermarkets, nursing homes, hospitals, doctor’s surgeries, hairdressers and other commercial organisations, with either own-label or our own brand Northern Tea Merchants teas and coffees.
Discover more about the journey from bean and leaf to bag here.
We've enabled Google Street View below so you can take a look around our factory for yourself.