Tea Co-Packer: Tea Bags, Sachets, Claims and Quotes

A tea co-packer blends and packs tea for a brand: loose leaf into pouches and tins, or into tea bags and pyramid sachets on machines too expensive for a small brand to own. The machine is why small tea brands often look for one: filling sachets by hand is slow, and a sachet machine runs thousands an hour. The rules are light for tea itself, and strict for what the box says, because a tea that claims to treat or prevent a disease is a drug to FDA. In the example below, an herbal tea company selling 800 boxes of sachets a month pays $4.87 a box filling them by hand, $4.12 with a co-packer on its own island, and $3.75 with a mainland co-packer whose minimum is six months of sales. Below is what tea co-packers do, the claims rule, what they need from you, three quotes, and a free calculator.

The short version

• Tea co-packers blend, fill and pack: loose-leaf pouches and tins, tea bags, pyramid sachets.
• Sachet and tea bag machines are why small brands often use one; minimums follow the machine's run.
• Send your own leaf and blend specs, or buy from the co-packer's stock for a private label tea.
• The facility is registered with FDA as a food facility.
• Keep claims to taste and tradition: claims to treat or prevent disease make a tea a drug.
• Tea keeps for months, so a bigger run is less risky than for fresh foods, if the cash allows.
• TaroStack keeps track of your leaf and boxes at the co-packer, by lot, as a site of its own. More below.

What tea co-packers do

A co-packer that packs food registers with FDA as a food facility (21 CFR 1.225); ask to see the registration, and ask whether it handles allergens or other teas that could carry over into yours. What a co-packer is, in general, is in what is a co-packer.

The claims that turn tea into a drug

Under federal law, a drug includes articles intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment or prevention of disease (21 U.S.C. 321(g)(1)). Intended use is read from what you say: on the box, the website and the market sign. So an herbal tea sold as "relaxing" or "a traditional Hawaiian tea" is a food; the same tea sold to "lower blood pressure" or "fight infection" is being sold as a drug, and that's a different set of rules. A co-packer may ask to see your label and website before it packs. This is general information, not legal advice. How a tea company is planned from the start is in tea business plan.

What a tea co-packer will ask you for

• The blend by weight, with each ingredient's supplier, and whether you send the leaf or they buy it.
• Specs: cut size for the machine (too fine leaks from sachets, too coarse jams), moisture, fill weight per bag.
• Packaging: boxes, pouches, tins, labels, and whether the sachet material and strings are theirs.
• A sample run to check the fill weight, the cut and the brew before the full run.

What a spec sheet holds is in product specification sheet.

Three quotes compared

Māmaki Mana Tea, a made-up herbal tea company on Hawaiʻi I use in these examples, sells about 800 boxes of 15 pyramid sachets a month. A box holds 37.5 grams of its blend at $40 a kilo, $1.50:

Filling by hand, 15 sachets take about five minutes a box: $1.67 of labor at $20 an hour, about 67 hours a month at 800 boxes. The island co-packer's machine cuts that to 85 cents and saves 75 cents a box, about $600 a month. The mainland co-packer saves another 37 cents, but the leaf goes across the Pacific and the boxes come back, and its 5,000-box minimum is six months of sales and $17,800 out. Tea keeps well in sealed boxes, so the mainland run is more about cash than freshness. How those trade-offs compare for other products is in co-packer vs commercial kitchen.

Get the calculator

Download the tea co-packer quote calculator. One column for each quote and one for filling it yourself: type the run you'd order, the minimum, the loss, the setup, the fee or your labor, your blend, packaging, freight and storage, and the run's cost, the months it takes to sell at your sales a month, the storage while it sells, the cost of each good box and the cash out before it sells fill in. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

Dried leaf from three farms, blended into five teas, part of it at the co-packer and part at home, boxes and sachet stock in both places, and boxes going to shops, hotels and online orders. A spreadsheet can't say how much of the māmaki is at the co-packer, which farm's leaf is in a box, or when to order the next boxes.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack keeps track of your leaf and boxes at the co-packer, by lot, as a site of its own.

The co-packer as a site. The co-packer's premises can be a site, so the leaf and boxes you send are a transfer, shown in transit until they arrive, and the finished boxes there are counted as yours. More than one site is on Standard at $99 a month.

Blends as recipes, runs as batches. Each blend is a recipe by weight, and each run is a batch that takes the leaf off stock and records the farm lots it used, so a box leads back to its leaf. "What could I make right now" says how many boxes the leaf on hand allows.

Packaging on time. Boxes, sachet stock and labels come up on the reorder list in days of cover, with each supplier's lead time and minimum. How stock in more than one place works is in multi-location inventory.

Sites, transfers, recipes, batches and lots are on Standard at $99 a month for more than one site. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

What is the minimum order for a tea co-packer?

It follows the machine's run. In the example, 1,000 boxes at an island co-packer and 5,000 at a mainland one.

How much does it cost to have tea bags made?

In the example, 85 cents a box of 15 sachets at a co-packer for the packing, plus the tea, sachets, box and freight: $4.12 a box all in.

Can I say my herbal tea has health benefits?

Claims to treat, cure or prevent a disease make a tea a drug under federal law. Taste, aroma and tradition are food claims.

Should I send my own tea to a co-packer?

If the leaf is your story, yes: toll packing keeps your sourcing. Private label tea from the co-packer's stock is simpler and less yours.