NORTHAMPTION, Mass.
Acclaimed tea author and retailer Mary Lou Heiss will be remembered for her adventures as the Tea Trekker and her expertise in preparing, photographing, and writing about fine food. She passed April 9.
“Mary Lou had a great curiosity and a yearning to experience tea up close and personal,” said fellow author and Elmwood Inn Fine Teas founder Bruce Richardson. “That interest took her around the world to meet tea growers. She was very generous in passing along her firsthand tea knowledge to a new generation of tea enthusiasts. We will miss her generous spirit,” he said. He recalled fondly their first meeting in 2002 at a food writer’s conference at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
"I always respected and admired her for her work and her writing," writes London-based tea educator Jane Pettigrew. 
Heiss first attended World Tea Expo in 2007. “Trade shows come and go, often being a victim of a segment of a market or a trend that failed to find a committed audience,” she wrote in The Leaf. The best shows grow and thrive despite the underpinning of the economy because they are tied to larger platforms of business, industry or market direction, not to individual situations. They also bring change and a new ‘something’ to their yearly events when fresh breath is need. With all this in mind, I think that World Tea Expo does a terrific job doing what it does: hosting the singular tea-only event in the U.S. for an industry that has experienced eye-popping double-digit growth.”
In an obituary published by McNally & Watson Funeral & Cremation Service, Heiss was remembered for her “uncanny ability to differentiate quality from hyped, inferior products and services. She was an astute buyer of merchandise and she excelled in presenting quality goods and their background stories.”
“She could not tolerate pretentious ignorance or the questioning of learned, expert knowledge for sport. Her interests included photography, cooking special foods and meals that were cohesive, culturally accurate, and ingredient-wise in terms of origin and season,” according to the obituary. “Her keen eyes and steady hands encouraged her to focus her travel and food writing which is still accessible at An Educated Palate.”
Mary Lou spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm on a range of culinary topics but when interviewed she would explain that “tea cultivation and manufacture and tea culture is my primary obsession and delight.”
Heiss once told Fresh Cup magazine: “there’s a lot of non-explaining in the tea world that we try to counter all the time. We tend to overexplain on our website, because we feel that so many others are not really explaining, throwing out these ideas and these concepts but without explaining why.”
See is survived by Robert, her husband and business partner for 43 years. Funeral services and burial were private.
Acclaimed tea author and retailer Mary Lou Heiss will be remembered for her adventures as the Tea Trekker and her expertise in preparing, photographing, and writing about fine food. She passed April 9.
“Mary Lou had a great curiosity and a yearning to experience tea up close and personal,” said fellow author and Elmwood Inn Fine Teas founder Bruce Richardson. “That interest took her around the world to meet tea growers. She was very generous in passing along her firsthand tea knowledge to a new generation of tea enthusiasts. We will miss her generous spirit,” he said. He recalled fondly their first meeting in 2002 at a food writer’s conference at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia.
"I always respected and admired her for her work and her writing," writes London-based tea educator Jane Pettigrew.
Heiss first attended World Tea Expo in 2007. “Trade shows come and go, often being a victim of a segment of a market or a trend that failed to find a committed audience,” she wrote in The Leaf. The best shows grow and thrive despite the underpinning of the economy because they are tied to larger platforms of business, industry or market direction, not to individual situations. They also bring change and a new ‘something’ to their yearly events when fresh breath is need. With all this in mind, I think that World Tea Expo does a terrific job doing what it does: hosting the singular tea-only event in the U.S. for an industry that has experienced eye-popping double-digit growth.”
In an obituary published by McNally & Watson Funeral & Cremation Service, Heiss was remembered for her “uncanny ability to differentiate quality from hyped, inferior products and services. She was an astute buyer of merchandise and she excelled in presenting quality goods and their background stories.”
“She could not tolerate pretentious ignorance or the questioning of learned, expert knowledge for sport. Her interests included photography, cooking special foods and meals that were cohesive, culturally accurate, and ingredient-wise in terms of origin and season,” according to the obituary. “Her keen eyes and steady hands encouraged her to focus her travel and food writing which is still accessible at An Educated Palate.”
Mary Lou spoke with knowledge and enthusiasm on a range of culinary topics but when interviewed she would explain that “tea cultivation and manufacture and tea culture is my primary obsession and delight.”
Heiss once told Fresh Cup magazine: “there’s a lot of non-explaining in the tea world that we try to counter all the time. We tend to overexplain on our website, because we feel that so many others are not really explaining, throwing out these ideas and these concepts but without explaining why.”
See is survived by Robert, her husband and business partner for 43 years. Funeral services and burial were private.