So you’re back again eh?
At this point I accept you may actually be interested in the contents of this tea blog, so let me tell you a little bit about how we gather our ingredients.
We are currently wading through roughly two feet of snow, but when summer begins to peak out over the horizon in late May, we know it is almost time for sunshine and strawberry season when we begin spending our “off ”days gathering the ingredients for our tea blends. We clear out the car and head to In-Law Farms in McBain, MI located about a dozen miles from Cadillac, MI.
Why In-Law Farms? I think the answer is simple, but let me explain our process. There are many modern practices that occur in the food industry that I believe are actively harming our planet and its people. The produce you consume may come from thousands of miles away before it reaches your local big box grocery store. In order for that process to be viable you need to create more product than you would ever hope to sell in order to account for the waste that occurs from shipping tons of delicate produce. Now you are paying for roughly 1.3 times the actual cost of the goods you receive just so that a large company can toss out billions of pounds of food every year. I don’t think I need to explain why this is bad.
When we started planning where to source our ingredients, we decided that there has to be a better way than ordering flats of produce from commercial food suppliers. So, we looked throughout the area and found that there are dozens and dozens of growers in our community that can supply us with some of the best ingredients a tea blender could hope for. We trust in the knowledge and experience that comes from generations of farming and don’t fool ourselves into thinking we have to do everything ourselves. We already pick and process the berries, we are happy to leave the growing and production to the farmers who know best.