A long history of success
Establishing a tea company in Frankfurt, far away from major seaports, was a bold step in the early 19th century. Our success story dates back nearly 200 years – now we are one of the world’s leading tea brands served at top hotels thanks to our focus on quality and creativity and our love of tea.
You need to be patient and passionate if you want to be successful in the tea business. This is why we cultivate our business relationships with the same attention to detail as we do our tea gardens: We have taken a sustainable and long-term approach ever since our company was founded by Johann Tobias Ronnefeldt in 1823. As the proprietor of the company I am continuing this rich tradition with the same vision and passion.
Jan-Berend Holzapfel
Owner
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Excellent tea from selected countries
The quality of our tea is a top priority for us. To meet our high standards, we select only the best growing countries for our tea gardens and perform regular quality checks to ensure the compliance of all Ronnefeldt products.
From the well-known tea gardens in Assam and Darjeeling on the slopes of the Himalayas and Yunnan in China, to Japan, Africa and South America – Ronnefeldt is looking for and finding the best teas in the whole world.
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Quality thanks to orthodox tea production
You can enjoy Ronnefeldt teas in the best hotels and restaurants of the world – and in many countries at home as well. Tea connoisseurs appreciate our hand-crafted, superior quality teas – every production step is executed carefully, incorporating traditional methods from the picking of the leaves in the tea gardens, blending and tasting of the tea all the way to filling and packing in bags and caddies. We ensure perfect tea quality for your enjoyment through continuous monitoring of every single step.
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In the tea garden
Tea is cultivated in many parts of the world. This is why we have high standards regarding quality and taste when we select our producing countries. We work together with our suppliers, the NGO Ethical Tea Partnership and the Childaid Network foundation to improve social and environmental standards in the tea growing countries so that we can continue offering our clients delicious, premium quality Ronnefeldt teas for many years to come.
Excellence as an overall seal of quality
Our responsibility does not end with the blending of our fine teas; it also includes the way how our products are presented and served. As it is the case with the purchase of our raw material, we exclusively work with reliable partners and use only high-quality packaging materials.
Our packaging is both innovative and appealing in terms of its look and feel. Thus the perfect preparation of our teas is guaranteed and a unique and pleasurable experience is ensured thanks to easy handling.
Hight quality
Our tea tasters are trained experts and connoisseurs with a keen sense of taste. Using all their senses they examine and taste the prepared tea as well as fruits and herbs, blending these into creations that meet the most discerning tastes of tea lovers all over the world. Our tea tasters sample hundreds of teas every week, carefully testing each and every one according to the highest standards.
BIO Organic
Organically cultivated products are becoming increasingly popular. Ronnefeldt meets this demand with a large selection of organic teas. The organic label guarantees controlled organic cultivation, i.e. the tea is grown without genetic modifications and without the use of chemical and synthetic pesticides. Moreover, we have all of our teas tested for residues at accredited German laboratories.
Variety and premium quality for our clientsWe are constantly working on ways to make it possible for our clients to experience the many facets of tea. Important factors here include: You need to be patient and passionate if you want to make it in the tea business. We promote sustainability in our daily actions and business relationships and take a long-term approach – just like our founder Johann Tobias Ronnefeldt did.Ensuring the quality of our productsWe take responsibility for our products seriously throughout every stage of production: The health of our clients is always the highest priority for us.We comply with the EU Health Claims Regulation and make no claims as to the effectiveness of our products.We adhere to the EU Food Information Regulation and communicate all ingredients, allergens, nutritional values and batch numbers.Independent, accredited laboratories test our teas for consistently high quality.Non-food items and materials are tested for food safety.Our production in Worpswede is kosher and halal certified.Our hygiene management system is HACCP compliant.
Our varied range of products
Excellent tea from around the world is in more demand now than ever before. This is why our assortment includes a variety of traditional teas such as black teas, oolong teas, green teas and white teas as well as various herbal infusions and a large selection of fruit infusions. Our tea tasters create aromatic tastes and flavours throughout the year for the enjoyment of diverse teas that perfectly fit every season. In addition to loose tea, we also offer pre-portioned solutions to meet the needs of our clients.
New materials
We continuously test new, environmentally sound materials and make sure that they are suitable for our production machines and for the contact with our teas. We are currently in the process of switching over to simple, unpainted materials for our sales packaging and are testing whether we can use compostable, biodegradable materials instead of films and filter papers. Our goal is that 50 per cent of our new products will be compostable in the next two years. Currently, recycled paper is not an alternative for us as it is not food safe due to impurities and therefore not suitable as a packaging material for our teas.
For product displays or porcelain we furthermore use only secondary raw materials certified to be food safe, such as artificial leather. We want to do what we can to protect the environment, so even our office supplies like stationery and printer paper or wood merchandise displays are FSC® certified. By mid-2019 we will verify that our partner printing companies use eco-friendly inks and FSC®-certified wood and paper only.