With roots stretching back to 1881, Wollenhaupt has spent more than a century quietly powering some of the world's most recognizable tea brands — sourcing, blending, and co-manufacturing from their headquarters in Reinbek, Germany. In September 2024, the fourth-generation, family-owned company made its most ambitious move yet: launching Wollenhaupt Tea North America to bring their full suite of services directly to the largest specialty tea market in the world.
We sat down with Jason Adams, CEO of Wollenhaupt Tea North America, Inc., who brings nearly two decades of industry experience to his role — from the retail floor at Teavana to the sourcing desk at one of the world's largest coffee and tea brands. Read on for our full discussion covering supply chain resilience, emerging flavor trends, and what it takes to build a standout tea brand in 2026.
Tell our readers more about your company.
Wollenhaupt’s history runs deep. Founded in 1881, Wollenhaupt has been family-owned and operated for more than 145 years. Passion for tea guides everything we do, and we’re proud of the innovation and contributions we’ve made to the tea industry. We were one of the early pioneers in the 1970’s, when flavored teas and herbal mélanges popped onto the scene. Currently under the stewardship of the fourth generation, brothers Dirk and Jörg Wollenhaupt lead an amazing team of tea professionals around the world. Our headquarters is located just outside the city of Hamburg, Germany, in the charming town of Reinbek. That’s where we purchase, process, blend, and pack some of the best tea in the world!
In September 2024, we embarked on our most recent endeavor and opened Wollenhaupt Tea North America. While we have supplied fine teas to the U.S. and Canada for decades, we saw an opportunity to extend our expertise, quality, and services to the largest specialty tea market in the world. Wollenhaupt operates throughout Europe, the UK, a joint venture in Zhejiang, China, and now the United States and North America. Tea is our passion, and you will find true tea lovers throughout the company; from accounting to marketing, purchasing to product development.
What products/services do you offer to the industry?
Our role in the greater tea ecosystem is a trusted, experienced, and reliable partner who can support any of your tea-related needs from behind the scenes. The tea business can be incredibly complicated, and we support our customers by simplifying the vast world of tea — from managing complicated global supply chains, ensuring consistent qualities across a massive range of teas and ingredients, and leveraging the experience we’ve gained through decades of work in the specialty tea industry. Wollenhaupt does it all, from sourcing, quality assurance, product development, contract manufacturing and packaging, to offering unique and beautiful tea wares.
We are organized into three teams to help meet every customer’s unique needs:
- Wholesale Trade + Co-Manufacturing of more than 400 catalog teas and blends, plus more than 3,500 active recipes, which have been designed in collaboration with our customers — available in bulk to retail-ready packaging
- Garden-Direct Tea Trade, specialized in offering the widest range of Camellia sinensis sourced from 26+ countries, available in any grade or cut you could imagine — from Spring Gyokuro to Assam CTC, we have it all!
- Raw Ingredient Trade, offering an extensive catalog of nearly 800 crops from more than 70 countries around the world; including herbs, spices, fruits, botanicals — all specifically focused on the specialty tea industry
We have had the privilege of supplying some of the biggest brands in the world, as well as super-premium specialty brands, and everything in between!
What sets Wollenhaupt apart from other wholesale suppliers — what's your competitive edge?
I think the best way to answer this question is from my own personal experience. I have worked in what you could consider the “specialty tea business” for almost twenty years, starting as a part-time “Teaologist” at Teavana™ and working my way up to the head of tea sourcing at one of the largest coffee & tea brands in the world. I got to know and appreciate Wollenhaupt as a customer first and experienced how they treated each customer like family, going out of their way to ensure the highest quality teas and delivering innovative products. My experience as a buyer gave me the opportunity to work with pretty much every wholesale tea blender and broker in the industry, and after more late-night conference calls, development workshops, supplier audits, and cupping sessions than I can count, I gained an unmatched respect and appreciation for this company. That’s a long way of saying that what I believe sets any company apart at the end of the day is the people, their commitment to excellence, and the passion and attention to detail they exhibit every single day.
Wollenhaupt has the infrastructure, expertise, and capacity to serve the largest tea brands in the world. We also provide the level of quality, service, flexibility, and passion to support the most discerning super-premium tea brands. I think we’ve found the right balance of scale and specialty service, and we genuinely care about our customers and their tea business. It has been an incredibly rewarding opportunity to experience from both the customer and supplier perspective, and I think we offer a unique benefit to our customers having walked a lot of miles in their shoes.
How has global supply chain volatility affected tea procurement and pricing, and how do you help your buyers navigate that uncertainty?
It’s no secret that the world has been a very complicated place in recent years, and I think the best defense against uncertain times is having the hard-earned experience that can only come through time. First, we nurture our relationships with growers and producers around the world to get insights and data from the source. This enables us to prepare and ideally plan around certain obstacles. Second, maintaining an incredibly broad and diverse supplier network is critical, as it can provide some insulation against unforeseen challenges, whether it’s related to climate change, geo-political turmoil, international transportation and logistics bottlenecks, etc. For buyers, the best thing they can do is plan ahead and try to secure contracts as far out as reasonably possible. And always be aware of the harvest seasons and crop times for critical origins, as many teas are only harvested once per year.
One way we’ve been adapting our purchasing is expanding our involvement with newer producing countries like Mozambique and Vietnam. We partner with farms and producers to improve quality, sustainability, and consistency. This could also involve structuring strategic partnerships, sometimes decades in the making, to ensure we are building capacity for the future, staying ahead of trends, and providing stability for our customers.
Overall, we have been able to successfully navigate recent challenges such as COVID-19, tariffs, evolving regulatory environments, and ongoing impacts from a changing climate. There will always be temporary issues, but our job is to mitigate and minimize that impact on our customers.
What minimum order quantities or purchasing structures do you offer, and how do you accommodate buyers of different sizes?
Wollenhaupt offers an extensive range of nearly 400 teas as part of our catalog assortment. The catalog teas are designed by our talented R&D team and offer an excellent option for buyers who want variety, proven and time-tested flavors, and low MOQ’s. Please contact me directly, [email protected] or register through our website, and we can set you up with access to our digital catalog!
What really differentiates Wollenhaupt is our approach to designing bespoke, custom teas and herbal mélanges, and the process of creating something truly special with our customers. Whether you wish to come visit our facility in Germany or we arrange samples directly to your door, we can help you create the teas of your dreams! Imagine having access to more than 2,000 teas, herbs, botanicals, fruits, spices, and flavors, and designing your own unique blends. It’s a lot of fun, and we love hosting these workshops and developing new flavors with our customers.
MOQ’s on custom blends can vary, but generally we require a minimum order of 100 kgs for custom blends. When it comes to packaging, we can do anything from 500kg super-sacks, 20kg bags, 1-2kg foil, cardo-bags, poly bags, or retail-ready packaging such as loose-leaf tins, pyramids, iced tea & cold brew sachets, standup bags, folded boxes, etc. Please check out website for a complete list of co-packing options, or contact me anytime (https://www.wollenhaupt.com/en/private-label/)
What challenges do you see members of the tea industry facing in 2026, and how can your product/service help them overcome these obstacles?
I expect we will continue to see challenges with global supply chains, which may have started with the volatile tariff environment and now look to expand into geo-political wars in critical regions. We are also looking at the regulatory landscapes around the world, specifically EU and U.S. Though not always easy, it is vitally important to stay ahead of food regulations and ensure products are maintaining the highest quality and food safety standards.
From the customer and brand standpoint, I think trends and purchasing patterns will continue to change rapidly, often outpacing the realities of complex agricultural supply chains. It may only take 30 seconds for some new trend to take off on TikTok but getting supply chains up and running takes much longer. Like we’ve seen with matcha in the past year, the planting and production couldn’t keep pace with demand, and farmers and producers have had to get creative and find ways of filling the gaps. This all has upward pressure on pricing and forces some buyers to look for different qualities or explore other origins like China, Korea, or Vietnam.
What trends are you seeing in the tea industry? Are there certain types or flavors of tea proving to be more popular?
One of the things I love most about tea is the variety. There are literally thousands of different types of tea, and most tea-drinking cultures have specific rituals and manners of preparation that I find endlessly fascinating. We’re living in a time when so many of our personal interactions occur digitally, so I love the way tea offers us an analog way to connect us as human beings. Much like we’ve seen in the culinary world, people want to experience other places, cultures, and customs through food and drink. Matcha is the most obvious example of this, and I think there will be more opportunities to reach new tea drinkers through a combination of functional benefits and cultural exploration. I’d love to see Pu-erh take off in a similar fashion, something with a rich geographical history, unique form & processing method, not to mention the associated health benefits.
In terms of flavor trends, we see a lot of success with combination flavors such as “Turmeric + Orange” or “Watermelon + Lime,” just to give a couple examples. The key is to offer an ingredient or flavor that is approachable and recognizable, mixed with something a bit unexpected or adventurous.
We also see a trend towards “swicy” or sweet + spicy. We have a new fruit blend that delivers a sweet, juicy Mango taste, and just a hint of chili at the finish. It’s delicious and makes for a very refreshing iced tea.
Another recent trend that we’ve seen is leaning into umami flavors, which would include things like adaptogenic mushrooms, black sesame, and more earthy flavors. This may never permeate down to the mainstream, but I could see the trend towards umami-rich flavors working well with the aforementioned Pu-erh.
On the beverage side, one of the biggest trends I’m seeing is towards non-alcoholic spirits and cocktails. This current generation is more health-conscious than ever before, and people are very focused on what they put into their bodies. I think teas and herbal blends can play a huge role in developing unique, complex, and delicious beverages aimed at this “sober-curious” crowd. Another big area in the beverage world is clean energy. I’m seeing L-theanine on a ton of labels, including natural energy drinks and botanical sodas. L-theanine is an amino acid found naturally in Camellia sinensis, which can help reduce stress and promote mental clarity. People are looking for a cognitive boost, without the jitters and crash you get from drinking coffee. There’s a wide range of compounds and ingredients in both tea (Camellia sinensis) and herbal mixtures like Yerba Maté, Guayusa, Guarana, Moringa, etc. that can deliver this natural boost. In general, I see lots of potential in supplement teas and continuing to explore functional benefits from both tea and herbs.
What advice would you give tea buyers and blenders who are trying to differentiate their offerings in an increasingly crowded market?
Try to define a clear point of view and identity for your brand. You are unlikely to be everything to everyone, so take time to develop your own identity and try to find a unique lane that allows your products to stand out. This could be focusing on a particular sustainability commitment, ingredient(s), packaging or brewing method, marketing angle, or target a specific type of consumer. Think “Teas for Fashionistas.” Ultimately, the brands I see become successful are those who know who they are, what needs they are meeting, and how they benefit the overall marketplace. They have a clear reason for being, and they stay true to that vision and purpose.
When it comes to advice for buyers and those working in the supply chain, I would suggest investing time and attention into your planning and forecasting systems and processes. It’s not sexy, but it can make or break a company and ensure you have product on shelf when it’s needed. From a product standpoint, I’ve seen brands have a lot of success with seasonal LTO’s (Limited Time Offerings). Tastes and preferences change throughout the year, and seasonal teas give customers a reason to come back and try something new. At Wollenhaupt, we continually monitor trends from across the tea, beverage, and culinary worlds to stay up on emerging ingredients & flavor trends. This research helps inform our purchasing, product development, marketing, and catalog assortment.
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