World Tea Expo’s 2025 Global Tea Championship (GTC) is open for submissions now through November 30! This prestigious competition celebrates excellence in tea production and is designed to identify and reward the highest quality teas from around the globe.
This year, the contest includes a variety of categories for tea and matcha:
Award Categories: Tea
- Grand Prize Award: Highest score for Overall Best Tea
- Superior Leaf Award: Highest leaf score for “Best Leaf Appearance” in each tea type White, Green, Oolong, Black, Puerh
- Superior Liquor Award: Highest score for “Best Cup Character” in each tea type White, Green, Oolong, Black, Puerh
- Premium Award: Highest score for “Best Tea” in each tea type White, Green (Steamed, Pan-Fired), Oolong (Long Oxidized, Short Oxidized), Black (Orthodox, CTC), Pu-erh (Sheng, Shou)
- Honorable Mention Award: Highest score for the Most Innovative Tea
- Origin Awards: Certificates for the best tea from each producing origin
Award Categories: Matcha
- Grand Prize Award: Highest score for Overall Best Matcha
- Superior Leaf Award: Highest leaf score for “Best Leaf Appearance”
- Superior Liquor Award: Highest score for “Best Cup Character”
- Premium Award: Highest score for “Best Matcha” in each tea type Ceremonial, Culinary
- Honorable Mention Award: Highest score for the Most Innovative Tea
- Origin Awards: Certificates for the best tea from each producing origin
Winners will be announced at the World Tea Expo Awards Reception on Tuesday, March 25, 2025. Grand Champion, Best Leaf and Best Liquor award winners of both the Tea and Matcha categories will have their teas sampled to thousands of attendees at World Tea Expo 2025.
We caught up with some of the early entrants to learn more about their teas and why they entered the GTC. Over the next week or so, we will be sharing our Q&As with these tea companies! We start off with Nepal Tea.
Chatting with GTC Contender Nepal Tea Collective
We spoke with long-time GTC participant Pratik Rijal, co-founder of Nepal Tea Collective, about his company and why he enters the GTC.
Tell our readers a bit about your company and the types of tea you supply/sell.
Nepal Tea Collective is a Public Benefit Corporation committed to delivering the freshest organic teas, herbs, and botanicals directly from our family farm and 10 other smallholder farms in Nepal. As a fully vertically integrated company, we oversee the entire process—from production and manufacturing to packaging—making us a one-stop solution for tea companies of all sizes in the U.S.
Our mission is two-fold: To establish a distinct identity for Nepali teas, herbs, and botanicals on the global stage, and to create an equitable trade model that uplifts farmers in the process.
We are also striving to lift 1 million farmers out of generational poverty. The global market has overlooked Nepali teas, largely because the country is situated between two tea giants—India and China. Despite this, Nepal produces some of the finest teas, with over 80 percent being exported and rebranded under foreign labels. As a result, Nepali teas lose their identity in the market, and middlemen profit while Nepali farmers see minimal returns and the generational cycle of poverty continues.
Also, the tea industry has been long due for traceability and transparency, and we are developing a proprietary system to set the highest standards by leveraging technology. We’re reinventing the way tea is sold globally, ensuring fairness across the supply chain, while creating a profitable business. Our teas are fully traceable through QR codes, which provide consumers with detailed information about everyone involved in the process—from the person who plucked the teas to the one who packed the product. Also, 1% of our top line revenue goes directly back to the farms so that we can empower them in the longer run.
Recently, we were also awarded a $1 million USAID grant to implement climate-smart technologies on our farms, furthering our commitment to sustainability. This initiative will significantly boost climate-smart farming practices in Nepal, ensuring the high-quality production, transportation, and storage of our premium orthodox teas, herbs, and spices, along with a robust demand-generation campaign. Unlike many projects that focus on a single challenge, our approach addresses both supply and demand. We are working with 10 tea and botanical farms, aiming not only to boost their production but also to drive demand, opening up international markets for our farmers. To ensure the success of this project, one of our primary goals is to increase the current demand for Nepali teas, herbs, and spices.
As we grow, we continue to offer a wide variety of premium orthodox teas loose leaf tea as well as fannings, broken for beverage company and co-packers, and CTC teas, as well as botanicals like lemongrass, cinnamon leaf, black cardamom, ginger, and turmeric. We cater to both small and large tea companies, offering competitively priced loose-leaf teas, herbs, and botanicals and encouraging direct trade with our farms. Additionally, we simplify the process by offering private label services for tea companies, ensuring that all tea and packaging needs are handled seamlessly.
Why did you decide to enter the World Tea Expo Global Tea Championship?
We’ve participated in the Global Tea Championship for several years now because it provides invaluable feedback and validation from industry leaders. In most commercial tea settings, producers are limited to making a few types of teas in response to market demand. However, competitions like the GTC encourage our farmers to experiment with different processing techniques, which not only excites them, but also helps refine the art and science of tea production.
For example, through experimentation, our producers along with some industry leaders during one of our tea tours discovered the BB157 cultivar, known for its distinctive rose character, which we now offer in limited quantities. The Rose Label Reserve ‘24 offers a 360-degree sensory journey. This luxurious tea delights with notes of musky camphor undertones, gracefully evolving into a blend of sweet, fragrant rose blossoms, subtly spicy notes, and melted brown sugar. It’s competitions like these that keep our producers motivated to innovate. What’s more exciting is that we’re seeing younger generations, some as young as 20, entering the production side of the business. We are thrilled to support their ambitions and showcase their creations at prestigious events like the GTC.
What would it mean to you to win an award in the World Tea Expo Global Tea Championship?
Winning an award would be an incredible honor for our farmers and producers, whose hard work would be recognized on a global scale. As we continue to build Nepal’s identity in the international tea market, accolades like these raise awareness among consumers and businesses alike, helping to demonstrate that Nepal produces exceptional teas that can draw in new customers.
For example, when we launched our white tea in 2017 and entered it into the GTC the following year, it became one of our best sellers, praised for its floral characteristics. Recognition from the World Tea Expo has always helped us grow our presence in the industry and connect with buyers from around the world, which is why we’ve participated every year since 2016.
Plan to Attend or Participate in World Tea Expo, March 24-26, 2025
To learn about other key developments, trends, issues, hot topics and products within the global tea community, plan to attend World Tea Expo, March 24-26, 2025 in Las Vegas, co-located with Bar & Restaurant Expo. Visit WorldTeaExpo.com.
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Phone: +1-212-895-8493; Email: [email protected]
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