Honest Tea is committed to the well-being of the folks along the value chain who help bring our products to market. We seek out suppliers that practice sustainable farming and respect for individual workers and their families.

In 2004, Honest Tea became the first bottled tea manufacturer in the US to market a Fair Trade certified product, our Peach Oo-la-long. Subsequently, we added Kashmiri Chai (no longer available), Pomegranate Red with Goji Berry and our Just Green and Just Black teas to the Honest Tea list of Fair Trade offerings. In 2008 Jasmine Green Energy Tea, Peach White Tea and Lemon Black Tea proudly joined the Honest Tea Fair Trade certified family.



Fair Trade certification ensures that workers on estates receive a fair share of profits and that the estate complies with specific criteria set by Trans Fair International to ensure equality and fairness. A joint body of workers decides how to reinvest profits from the tea to support community development projects.

Over the past few years, Honest Tea has built a strong relationship with the Makaibari estate, which provides much of our Fair Trade Certified™ tea. During this time, our funding (made possible by your purchase of Honest Tea’s Fair Trade products), has gone to support many important initiatives, voted on by workers at the tea plantation. One such effort was proposed by Ms. Pratima Tamang, the grand-daughter of Makaibari’s retired factory supervisor. Pratima had completed a computer course at NIIT, a well-known computer school in Calcutta, and recognized the value of computer literacy. She proposed to the Fair Trade Joint Body that they establish a computer center for the use of estate workers and their children. A short time later, the Makaibari Computer Center opened with two computers and a printer, and is available to anyone in the Makaibari village. Already over 200 children have enrolled in the computer school, where they are learning critical skills that would otherwise be beyond their reach due to the high cost. The computers, complete with Internet connections, have opened a whole new world to the children – a world they are eager to explore and learn from.