ETP has this month started work on Project Thea, an initiative designed to explore the tea sector’s ongoing sustainability requirement challenges: the growing complexity, duplication and lack of clarity of expected standards and data required from producers, alongside the increasing data needs for buyers.
In May 2025, the Global Tea Coalition (GTC) – an industry forum bringing together senior packer and producer leaders – mandated ETP to explore these challenges and assess if there is a more coordinated, sector-level approach to addressing them.
Challenges in a nutshell
Producers are dealing with multiple, overlapping sustainability requirements and data requests from certification schemes, individual buyers and country-led initiatives. These requirements often overlap and are inconsistent in phrasing and format, creating confusion for producers about what they are expected to do and the data they need to present.
This fragmentation and lack of clarity has led to growing compliance costs, increased administrative workloads and duplicative reporting for producers, often with little tangible benefit against the backdrop of persistently low global tea prices.
At the same time, buyers are under growing pressure to access useful and comparable data to meet human rights and environmental due diligence expectations and to understand where resources are most needed to mitigate supply chain risks. In response to data gaps, buyers often introduce additional, bespoke requests and expectations, further adding to complexity.
From the buyer perspective, data from certification audits is often binary or not always accessible, making it difficult to conduct effective due diligence and to identify where action and resources are most needed. While additional buyer tools and questionnaires may help individual companies, they further fragment expectations across the sector and add to the burden on producers. This fragmentation also limits the availability of consistent, standardised and comparable data that could support better collective decision-making.
About Project Thea
The two-year project will be taken forward by ETP under the oversight of the GTC. ETP will lead the process and be responsible for managing the working group – split evenly between packers and producers – and delivering the project outputs.
While the initial working group has been deliberately kept small to ensure the work remains focused and manageable, ETP will engage the wider membership and broader tea sector at key stages of the project.
Project Thea will explore whether greater alignment is possible across the sector, including:
- Building consensus around a core set of sustainability questions or data points that buyers request from producers.
- Developing a shared understanding of what constitutes responsibly sourced tea.
- Exploring how data might be managed and shared in ways that support risk mitigation, continuous improvement and collective action, without increasing risk for producers.
Importantly, this work will not result in the development of a new certification or standard, nor in adding further requirements for producers. The aim is to harmonise and consolidate what already exists to improve efficiency in the tea sector. All work undertaken and resulting outputs will be open source.
The initial focus will be on understanding where sustainability expectations and data requests can be better aligned to improve efficiency for producers and ensure time and resources are more effectively directed towards addressing the challenges in tea.
ETP is making preparations to grow the working group which already has representatives of TATA Consumer Products, Taylors of Harrogate, Ostfriesische Tee Gesellschaft, Twinings, Ringtons, Camellia Group, PGI, Browns and Finlay Beverages UK. ETP is also working to recruit a dedicated Project Lead to guide the project over the next two years. Further updates on the project will be shared as updates become available.
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