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Numi Organic Tea

Also known as: Numi Tea, Numi

An organic tea company founded in 1999 in Oakland by Iraqi-born siblings Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani. Direct-relationship sourcing with named tea gardens and farmer cooperatives across China, India, Sri Lanka, Egypt, South Africa, and beyond. Founded the Numi Foundation to fund clean water and education projects in tea-growing regions. Among the most-certified retail tea brands in the U.S.

Why this listing

Aligned-service because Numi’s whole revenue stream is built around making organic, fair-trade, single-origin tea legible to U.S. retail at a price that pays meaningful premiums to growers. The Numi Foundation closes the loop: profit returns to source communities as clean-water and education infrastructure, audited and reported.

Practical

  • Direct-relationship sourcing — named tea gardens in China, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, South Africa, Egypt, and elsewhere; the company publishes farm-and-garden documentation.
  • Numi Foundation — funds water-purification systems and schools in tea-growing communities; tracks per-region project impact.
  • Compostable packaging — among the early U.S. brands to push for fully home-compostable tea bags (no plastic in seal or string).
  • Climate Neutral Certified — full-supply-chain emissions accounting and offsetting.

Cultural

Co-founders Ahmed Rahim and Reem Hassani bring a Baghdad-rooted family tea-drinking tradition into a U.S. retail tea market that had been dominated either by commodity bagged tea (Lipton, Tetley) or by high-end specialty tea inaccessible to mainstream grocery. Numi’s gambit was that organic, fair-trade, single-origin could exist in a $4 retail box on a co-op shelf. Twenty-five years in, it has.

Lenses still to grow

  • Tea botany, varietal, and processing tradition (separate concept entries on [[tea|Camellia sinensis]], oolong, pu-erh, etc.)
  • Profile of named partner gardens
  • The Foundation’s named regional projects
  • Comparative analysis: tea vs coffee vs cacao supply chains for fair-trade aligned-commerce

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Enables: [[traditional-chinese-medicine]]
  • Shares approach with: [[guayaki-yerba-mate]] · [[equal-exchange]]
  • Member of: [[business]]

Sources

  • Numi Tea company communications and impact reports
  • B Lab certification record
  • Numi Foundation annual reports
  • Coverage in [[civil-eats|Civil Eats]], Cultured Magazine

Rooted in life.

A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]]. Filed under [[san-francisco-bay-area]] in [[directory|the directory]].

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

shares approach with

  • Organic India two organic-tea operations with direct-source-named-cooperative relationships and foundation-anchored community-development programs
  • Traditional Medicinals kindred organic + fair-trade tea brand at consumer scale

2 inbound links · 4 outbound