Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/95647
V eerinder Chawla hates chamomile. He may not despise the taste of the oft-consumed infusion, but he doesn't like what it represents. Chamomile is not tea—it doesn't grow from the Camellia sinensis plant—yet it's continually lumped into the tea category in marketing and on grocery store shelves. The nomenclature harrumphing may sound like splitting hairs, but following tea to the source is one of the topics closest to Chawla's heart. He opened Portland's The Tao of Tea as a single shop in 1997; in the ensuing years, he has added a second retail location, a line of bottled teas and 2,000 wholesale accounts across the United States. Chawla's connection to origin is the company's foundation: He visits major producing regions annu- ally to source tea, striving to celebrate and improve growers' lives and work. It's a drizzly Halloween afternoon when I visit The Tao of Tea's flagship loca- tion, on a bustling stretch of Portland's Southeast Belmont Street. Inside the low-lit shop, a softly rumbling water feature provides the subtle soundtrack for several tables' worth of quiet conver- sations. Wooden shelves holding teapots affix one wall, while comfortably worn tables and chairs dot the interior. I head upstairs to Chawla's spacious but sparse office, where rain peppers the two skylights. Chawla, 46, has a wild gray-white beard and dark eyes, and over a pot of Taiwanese oolong he tells me about his path to specialty tea, his passion for the source and his thoughts on why the specialty aspect of specialty tea is being lost as the indus- try expands. Q: A: Q: A: Where did you grow up? I'm originally from a little town called Amritsar in north India, at the border of India and Pakistan. When I was about 10, my family moved to New Delhi. One of the reasons we moved there was so my father could work with his father, who had a homeopathic dispensary, a movie theater busi- ness and a cotton trading business. I went from there to an under- graduate degree in economics at University of Delhi, and from there I came for a master's degree in management at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. India to Oregon is a big move—what prompted it? I met a counselor in Delhi who was giving pre- sentations to college students. He came from the Northwest, knew about Willamette and spoke very highly of it. I had some friends in Eugene (about an hour south), and they also spoke highly of Willamette. I didn't think much about it; I just had this interest to go and explore. Q:A: What led you to switch to a career in tea? In consulting, you start a project, you present your findings, your project comes to an end, you have a little rest and then you start again. It doesn't stop. I knew I wanted a change from consulting, but I didn't know what. So I decided to sell everything I had, travel around the world for a year and try to come up with some idea. And in that search for what to do, I came up with some criteria. One crite- rion was I wanted to do something ageless. For example, music is ageless. Education is ageless. Two, I wanted something that is good for you and good for the planet. Three, because I'd traveled so much for my consulting work, I wanted to not travel as much. The fourth criterion was that nobody else should be doing it in my hometown, Portland. If anybody else was already doing what I'm doing, then it's not a new idea. This was also a time period, 1995 or 1996, when Starbucks was going through the roof in terms of growth. I went back to continued on page 40 Fresh Cup Magazine 39 Q: A: What was your first job out of Willamette? I went into management consulting with [financial services company] Deloitte. I did a variety of gen- eral management consulting things, including a lot in the utility industry and energy industry. This was in the early 1990s—an era of green initiatives before green became more focused. I was help- ing large corporations in the U.S. come up with energy manage- ment and conservation strategies. I traveled a lot with Deloitte— overseas and within the U.S. After five or six years at Deloitte, I did another strategy management consulting job with a company called A.T. Kearney out of Washington, D.C. I would commute from Portland to D.C. every week, and I did that for a year. Veerinder Chawla (seen here with growers at Wudong Mountain in China's Guangdong Province) visits each major tea-producing country annually.