With a name that pays homage to the French origins of the State of Louisiana, the team at Fleur de Lis Tea Company is thankful for the loyal patronage of Louisianans. That said, what they sell is a far cry from gumbo, jambalaya, and shrimp creole. One might enjoy a pairing with some farmstead creole cream cheese on baguette bread, but spicier fare may well make enjoying the delicate teas cultivated on the tea farm of Fleur de Lis a bit of a stretch.
That the company exists at all is something of a stretch—to expectations, that is. At least it was to Owner David Barron in 2012, when he bought the 160-acre pine forest in rural Amite on which the company was established. A successful proprietor of a manufacturing company with contracts from such giants as NASA and Disney, he had bought the land upon his retirement with the expectation of just sitting back and taking in the view along with the sweet scent of pine.
Notwithstanding the restful surroundings, it turns out that Barron isn’t exactly the kind of guy who can sit around for long. But becoming ensconced in such a verdant abode, it did change his outlook: He became more connected to nature, and was moved to deepen that bond.
Enter plant breeder and friend, Buddy Lee, who, in a way, wisped into Barron’s life on the wings of a breeze.
“Almost everything about the beginning of this business was serendipitous,” says Production Manager Hans Marchese, putting the plantation’s genesis in context.
Indeed, as Marchese tells it, Lee—a plant designer—would breed maybe a thousand plants for certain specific traits, and once the exercise was complete, he’d need to get rid of the excess flora to avoid cross-pollination with his genetically specific products. Consequently, he would call up people with land like David Barron and say something like, "Hey, could you use maybe a thousand gardenias?" Otherwise, Lee would have had to just burn them.
Perennially on the lookout to improve his property, Barron would generally reply to the effect of: "bring 'em over." Then, Barron would find some areas to integrate them into the forest.
On an incredibly consequential day in 2017, Barron got a call from Lee asking him if he could take around a thousand Camellia sinensis plants off his hands. ‘Camellia what?’ would have been Barron’s reaction, for the retired machinist had absolutely no knowledge of tea cultivation. Still, he took in the plants and reckoned he could find a place for them, thinking they might look nice in between the tall pines where drag lines had been cleared to enable equipment to move through the forest.
Unwittingly, Barron’s choice of placement ended up shading the nascent tea plants from Louisiana’s punishing sun, giving them just the right amount of light and heat to thrive.
In 2019, when Barron hosted a visit by the United States League of Tea Growers, some researchers at Louisiana State University (LSU) accompanied them to examine and process the leaves as part of a project for which they were funded. The tea experts marveled at the "strategic" placement of the bushes. LSU researcher Dr. Yan Chen congratulated Barron for recognizing that the pine trees helped keep the soil acidic, creating the ideal terroir for cultivating tea. Barron just smiled and nodded as though this was part of the plan all along, his family members stealing glances at one another that would have been worthy of the TV show, The Office.
It was after this interaction that Barron realized he had almost accidentally created something exceptional on his property.
For two years, Barron and his son’s girlfriend Cheyenne (who is no longer at Fleur de Lis), simply maintained the plants, but it was a lot of work. He realized he needed help. The labor pool in Louisiana isn’t exactly brimming with tea cultivators, but he tapped every segment of his personal and professional network, nonetheless. He ended up finding the ideal person to take on the role of managing the garden at one of the unlikeliest of places – a pig farm. That is not a typo, by the way. Hans Marchese, the fulcrum of the operation, was found at a pig farm.
Building the Team and Gaining Expertise
Marchese, who would become an integral part of Fleur de Lis, had moved from Austin, Texas to New Orleans with dreams of spreading tea culture in America’s deep south. He started a small retail business there, but to make ends meet, he would drive an hour and a half outside the city to a pig farm, which, given the conditions of the labor market then, was pretty much the only place he could find steady work.
While he toiled, he imagined he was in taking in the floral aroma of tea bushes as they became ripe for the plucking. Sometimes, it pays to dream of being somewhere else.
To his credit, the owner of the pig farm, realizing that Hans wasn’t exactly having fun, asked him what he wanted to do long-term. Hans admitted that he had a small retail tea business on the side.
“Would you like to work at a tea farm?” the owner asked. Hans was agape at the question. He had no idea that, outside of Hawaii, tea was being grown in the United States at all.
He handed Marchese David Barron’s phone number and simply said, “Don’t mess it up.” But for a while, Marchese worked for both operations until Baron brought him on full time.
Marchese made the transition from pig farmer to tea cultivator when, impressed with the young man’s enthusiasm for tea, Barron appointed him production manager. He added that at the time, production was zero, and the tea plantation was basically just a hobby.
“I always say I smelled a little better for my wife when I came home from the tea farm rather than from the pig farm,” Marchese quips. “The very first thing we ever did was a tea tour, and I run it exactly how I ran it then to this day.”
Working in an essentially pressure-free environment on a hobby farm was an added bonus. Then came the tearoom. Everything was about to change.
At some point after 2020, Barron envisioned that people would come to his property to enjoy the tea that Marchese would cultivate, but he thought he needed a place to serve it. Perhaps the space could even be used for events, maybe even weddings, he thought.
So, once reasonably normal life had resumed after COVID, construction was started on an ambitious tearoom with a capacity of around seventy-five people with frontage for another hundred and fifty. Two bridge gazebos on top of ponds were added, adding to the farms appeal as a wedding destination. Barron’s former life as a manufacturer came in handy: He was able to find and deploy the labor quickly, even working on it himself.
By the time the construction was complete, Marchese had been working for the company for around a year and a half, closely monitoring and nurturing the young plants as they matured into bushes that could actually produce a harvest. This was when, as Marchese tells it, Barron shared a revelatory decision with him: “You know, I said this was a hobby,” Baron began, adding, “but I just spent half a million on the building, so maybe we should start bringing some money in.” And just like that, the hobby morphed into a commercial enterprise.
Marchese recalls the trepidation this created in him: “I’m like, ‘Okay, no pressure, David!’”
As with the tea plants, the business now would need to flush.
Understanding that tea retailer does not equal tea cultivator, Barron found and contacted Beverly-Claire Wainright, a renowned tea consultant and founder of The Scottish Tea Factory. Licensed to teach at the United Kingdom Tea Academy and chief mentor to nine small tea farms in Scotland that were developed from untended estate gardens. Wainright seemed like the right resource to guide Marchese to make yet another transition: that of retailer and horticulturalist to commercial tea cultivator. She could also help them design their tea.
“It's Better to be Lucky than Smart”
Barron has often been known to say that he’d rather be lucky than smart. Not only has the location of the tea farm been serendipitous for the planation, but the plants themselves were also selected near perfectly for the land into which they were plunged.
Originally sourced from China—like the orthodox leaf that the British smuggled into India and planted in Darjeeling to create the greatest tea-growing region in the world—Barron’s tea is also China Bush. However, his tea was acquired by Russians whose botanists selected the heartiest varieties for transplantation in the Russian Empire long before the formation of the USSR.
They chose an area with a relatively mild climate in the foothills of the caucuses called Georgia (an independent republic since the fall of the USSR). It is this Chinese/Georgian leaf that Lee offered to Barron, which was nursed and planted in Fleur de Lis. The selectively bred plants have come to thrive in the Louisiana climate where there is both snow in the winter and punishingly hot summers.
One element that kills tea plants, however, is too much rain. On average, Amite gets the right amount of rain for tea cultivation, but it tends to come in deluges. When this occurs, drainage is a problem. In this, too, Barron has been lucky because, where his plants are mainly planted, the land is slightly inclined. In other areas of the property, downpours produce accumulation, which would have essentially drowned his crop if not for the slanted topography of the tea fields.
“Most of Louisiana is just flat, and that's not going to be good. [The tea bushes are] going to be sitting in water. We are very lucky that there's actually a gradual slope, and all of the runoff is actually captured in our—we have a little pond, so most of the surface water just runs right off,” says Marchese.
Marchese credits the placement of the bushes in between pine trees as a main factor in the flavor profile that the farm is able to produce in the leaves. “The tea will actually grow too fast if it's in full sun, and it won't build up the aromatic compounds as much,” says Marchese. He mentions that at other tea plantations, shade trees are planted in between rows of tea bushes but it was already done at Fleur de Lis.
For the Love of Tea, a Valentine's Day Start
The growing season at Fleur de Lis runs from the early spring to late fall, even early winter.
“The very first thing I do every year for the plants is, on Valentine's Day in the middle of February, I'll prune them back. So, our plucking season usually starts a month after that,” says Marchese, adding: “And I used to say that our season went until about early October, but this year [2024] I found that it was so warm, especially at night, that the plants – not all of them – but we had about 20% growth all the way through November almost into December. So, that was incredible to me!”
Commercial planting began in 2022 around half-way through the growing season. Still, the tea farm was able to produce around thirty pounds of tea. This has more than doubled to around seventy pounds (inclusive of green tea and specialty teas) by the last growing season.
Marchese describes the season in terms of three general harvests or ‘flushes.’ They have a spring flush, which goes for direct sale to Harney & Sons Fine Teas, a large tea retailer based in Millerton, New York. Then, when it gets really hot in the summer, for around two weeks, they get no growth.
“And then it'll come back,” says Marchese. “After that, it's almost like we have two separate seasons where it's like spring, early summer, and then late summer-fall.”
The spring harvest goes directly to Harney & Sons because after consultant Beverly Wainright produced the first batch of professionally processed spring leaf, it was sent to the tea retailer for quality assessment. They responded by asking how much Fleur de Lis had—and could they buy all of it? This has been their request since the first batch was sent. Consequently, the spring harvest called Royal Flush is sold exclusively by Harney & Sons.
Not only does the tea they send to Harney & Sons sell out, but sending it to them also provides much needed exposure to the obscure tea farm: “It's almost like free advertisement,” Marchese explains. “Because they are the biggest retailer in the US. And they have our tea on their website, and hundreds of people every year find out about us through their website.”
Wainright’s involvement was central to the garden’s design of their bestselling tea, called “The Big Easy,” which is a summer black tea. She also developed their green tea.
While Fleur de Lis hasn’t really invested in marketing, the company doesn’t have to look very far to find its market. “I would say 80% of our tea is sold directly to the consumer, either through the website or locally. We're at the farmers market, and there are a few people who do wholesale, but they might only get a pound here or there, and it's not as consistent. But right now, it's almost all directly through the website where we sell our tea,” Marchese says.
That doesn’t mean that selling whole leaf black tea to Americans, especially those from the deep South, is easy. Fleur de Lis has to overcome preconceived notions about how to brew black tea—and what it should taste like. The public’s main consumption preference is iced tea during the sweltering heat of Louisiana summers. In winter, a potently astringent hot tea with lemon and sugar is preferred. Typically, this will be a Lipton style tea bag or a bitterly strong Crush Tear Curl (CTC) tea, in the form of almost granules. An aromatic whole leaf tea with a complex flavor profile, ready to be consumed with little or no sweetness added, is something rather new to Louisianans and their Southern cousins—to the USA as a whole, actually.
“In general, selling a black [whole leaf] tea to the American market is actually fairly difficult,” says Marchese, “They’ve formed an idea in their own mind of what it should taste like so...what I have to do is differentiate us from what people believe that tea is.”
Marchese has been doing tea tours for people who visit the tea farm since before it even went commercial. He says that while his job title is production manager, he often it feels that it should be: “interpreter for redefining tea.” So, a strong emphasis is placed on education when Marchese gives his tea tours.
Indeed, tourism and local visits have grown substantially at the property, giving Marchese the opportunity to educate larger numbers of potential consumers. The exposure to locals has been central to building up the tea farm’s core customer base.
Marchese asserts that much of the customer loyalty comes from the pride people have in their state, “We do a lot of education. And our marketing is heavily directed towards Louisianans,, and people in Louisiana love anything in Louisiana.”
There are people who do come from out of state, however—many by recreational vehicle (RVs). Some know about the estate from their RV club and others just come because it’s in their path. The general convention at the property is that someone can park onsite and spend the night for free so long as they buy something from the tea shop.
A local bed and breakfast called Bievenue Mon Ami (Welcome My Friend) lists Fleur de Lis as a nearby attraction. The cross-marketing benefits both businesses.
In addition, Barron has built a lodge opposite the pine forest, which has rooms for people to rent through Airbnb, so they can spend more than a day at the property, taking in the full tea tourism experience.
As the concept of “immersive tea tourism” gains momentum, in which tourists are encouraged to participate in the plucking and hand-processing of the tea leaves, Fleur de Lis has developed a tea course that is unique in that people are taught how to make tea at home. A defining characteristic of the course is to instruct people on how to make tea without using expensive equipment, focusing on what’s readily available in most homes.
“We have a lot of people that we've sold 5 or 10 plants to…and it's a whole day, and we'll actually make black and green tea together,” says Marchese. “And when we do that, they actually get to take a few ounces of what we make home with them.”
Personalization of experiences in many aspects of the tourism industry is becoming increasingly sought after by tourists. Fleur de Lis’ tailored tea-making course meets this demand quite well. When people can drink and serve tea that they can claim they’ve actually "made," the value in terms of feeling ownership of the product and being a part of the brand, as well as the memories that come up when they talk about it or make tea for others, heightens the desire to revisit the estate to such an extent that the value is incalculable. Almost without exception, people who undergo such experiential tourism become customers for life.
Even as brand loyalty is firm, Marchese and the team are continually looking to add new teas and enhance their line of products both in terms of quality and variety. Their green tea honors Louisiana’s French roots in its name, Thé Vert. In addition, they offer a limited quantity of White Tea, which is called Tea Blossom, and recently added an apple spice tea.
Notably, through Wainright’s connections, Fleur de Lis has partnered with an artisanal plantation in Myanmar called Mogok (or Five Trees). These more aromatic leaves are imported by Fleur de Lis and blended with their own summer tea, The Big Easy, to make what they call their “Friendship Blend,” which has become quite popular.
The teas that make up the international blend were recognized in 2022 by the United Kingdom Tea Academy (UKTA) at their annual worldwide tea competition called the Leafies. Notably, Fleur de Lis earned the “highly commendable” award. So, right from the commencement of commercial production, Fleur de Lis has been gaining worldwide recognition for the quality of their black tea.
Although the strength of the tea seems to be overcoming inherent market-driven obstacles quite smoothly, the team at Fleur de Lis has been challenged to clear all of the regulatory hurdles due to the US bureaucracy around the various verticals of the business: agriculture, tourism, food & beverage, etc..
“We had to get a restaurant license, but we're also a food manufacturer [regulated by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA)]. And then on top of that, I had to get my food manager’s license, and then farm manager’s. Although our regulators are generally quite sweet, there's a ton of red tape,” Marchese asserts.
One of the factors that has inhibited the establishment of tea plantations in the United States, in addition to the investment in land and equipment, has been the relatively high cost of labor compared to other tea-growing regions. Hence, the key to keeping a small-scale plantation of like Fleur de Lis running efficiently has been to keep the team tight.
Marchese does all of the plucking and sometimes gets help from his wife, Lyra-Grace Schwartz (who is also responsible for the company’s online presence), when the day’s flushing is really heavy. He also is responsible for processing, conducting the tea tours – and, until recently, was even responsible for events.
“Of course, the owners are involved on a daily basis,” Marchese says. Indeed, Barron has become known as a machinist convert to green thumb, locally. “But we’re basically just three employees. There’s me, my wife, and Alex Graver who does event coordination. And I’m really thankful she was brought on because between tea design, production, tours, and dealing with regulators, managing events on top was really a lot! It was hard to focus on one aspect because the other elements kept coming in.” Other than the team, a chap comes in regularly to mow the rather prodigious lawns of the property.
Fleur de Lis, therefore, really has the feel of a family business, and it's the very definition of an efficient operation. Being able to keep operating costs down coupled with Barron owning the property outright, has enabled Fleur de Lis to keep its rental rates for events such as weddings very competitive, especially in the highly inflationary environment that the country has faced post-COVID.
“The great thing is that the two sides of the business are really synergistic,” says Marchese. “We may get some people in for a tea tour, and they’ll see how beautiful a venue it is, or they decide to hold an event here and then realize that we’re a tea plantation.”
For Marchese, it has been a profound learning experience to be an integral part of evolving the business from its foundation – one with which he genuinely feels privileged to be associated.
“It was really amazing. Me and my wife, we got to be there from the very inception and build the company from the ground up," says Marchese. “To be able to design all these programs and to…see it grow, to see what worked and what didn't, and, man, I don't know if I'll ever do it again.”
Aside from focusing on adding more plants and increasing their market base, the company plans to apply for a new US Department of Agriculture grant for marketing as to say their budget is light on marketing may well be an understatement. That said, the company has spent on development, building a road that was needed due to the presence of two low water crossings preventing buses from entering the property. Consequently, Fleur de Lis can now accommodate bus tours, and they’ve connected with some tour companies to bring more tourists in by bus. Barron hopes this endeavor will enhance their profile.
For Marchese, he looks forward to more people visiting the property because he really delights in the interaction. “I really enjoy those [bus tours] because it's mainly retired people, and they have no idea anything about tea. So, I get to wow them and make it seem like I know everything about tea!”
One of the notions that Marchese tries to convey to those who visit is that the tea grown from Fleur de Lis’ plantation has more in common with fine wine in terms of flavor profile than that of a tea bag, which is made from bitter CTC tea and requires the addition of sugar and/or lemon. So, Marchese is working hard to achieve that paradigm shift in perception, and when it happens, it is really rewarding: “That’s something that really amazes the American public.”
What Fleur de Lis has accomplished thus far is also pretty amazing.
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