Q&A: Nigel Melican

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By Dan Bolton

During three decades as a product developer and troubleshooter, Nigel Melican has earned a reputation for applying an artful mastery of technology and insight that has improved tea manufacturing in 26 countries.

His focus is mechanization, yet he has empowered countless small farmers with techniques for handmade tea production and marketing. He encourages the use of sustainable growing practices and manufacturing methods while insisting that profitable tea production does not require exploitative wages or dismal working conditions. He is passionate in support of tea cultivation in non-traditional countries. Melican was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. League of Tea Growers but is no less influential in India where he serves as the D.N. Borboa Chair for tea quality and manufacturing at the Tea Research Institute in Jorhat, Assam.

He is the 2018 recipient of the John Harney Lifetime Achievement Award. Teacraft, the UK-based consultancy that he established in 1990 benefits from his engineering skills evident in the award-winning Teacraft ECM system for miniature manufacture of black and green tea, now used by leading tea producers and tea research institutes worldwide. In February 2018 Melican delivered the keynote address at the UC Davis Global Tea Initiative’s 3rd annual symposium.

STiR: In your presentation “Tea in the Future – A Bumpy Ride” you make the case that the tea industry is set to change more during the next 20 years than it has in the last 200, and arguably in the last 2000.

Melican: In today’s world tea appears to be doing very well. Production has been on a steady upward trend for the past 20 years. There is buoyant demand based on product innovation and health benefits. In producing countries, including India and China, a rising middle class is spending more on quality tea. In today’s world tea is sitting pretty but, as responsible stakeholders in this industry, we must look closely at tomorrow’s world. There are issues on the horizon, challenges that are not yet being addressed, nor yet even recognized. Challenges that will alter the tea industry and change tea as we know it. Sustainability is the goal, but I fear sustainability may be severely challenged by upcoming events.

STiR: Will you summarize the most troubling of these challenges?

Melican: There are both internal and external concerns. Impelling external challenges include urbanization, population growth, increasing land scarcity, climate volatility.  By 2015 population growth alone, according to the UN, will require 65% more food production to feed the additional 3 billion mouths predicted: this will threaten non-essential beverage crop growing. Internally there are fundamental changes affecting the workforce, the production process, the positioning of tea, and the product itself. 

Future tea scarcity is a real concern even without land competition. Kenya, Sri Lanka, and China grow 61% of the tea traded internationally. Exports have plateaued for several years. India was for decades one of the top three tea exporting countries. It took 100 years for India’s middle classes to drink enough to significantly reduce the tea available for export. Kenya might only take 30 years for the same to happen. Kenyans consume only 6.2% of their tea. If Kenyans drank 80% of their annual harvest, as China and India now do, there would be a 400,000 metric ton shortfall on the world market―equal to a 21% reduction in global supply.

STiR: You mention a great divide is becoming apparent with commodity tea driving down quality in exchange for a low price.

Melican: As an example, look at the prices per serving of typical (Tesco) supermarket beverages. Tea sells for one-third the price of coffee. Juice sells for 38 cents per serving and dairy for 39 cents per serving, bottled water averages 18 cents per serving—tea sells for just 4 cents per cup. Now, consider Hawaiian-grown Big Island Tea sold recently at Harrods for $4,130 a pound. A pound will make at the very least 150 cups of tea at $27.50 per cup. Is it worth it? Yes, to some people because it ticks all the boxes for specialty tea: story, origin, transparency, rarity, prestige. It is an example of hand-picked, artisanal processed, certified organic tea with Harrods’ endorsement. This is specialty tea at its most extreme.

The spectacular growth of the specialty tea sector in the last 30 years is largely due to decisions by consumers―first a few and increasingly a flood—to go down the road of quality rather than low price.  Other mainly developed countries are following the trend: Europe, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, even China, and India are seeing growth in the high price, high-quality tea sector

STiR: Growing tea is resource intensive. It requires a lot of land and immense amounts of water. It takes more energy per kilo to produce than the same amount of steel.

Melican: Only one-third of the world’s land is farmed and two-thirds of that is pasture. Just 28% produces all our cereals and vegetables and only 3% is used for permanent crops-orchards, vineyards, nut crops and the caffeinated beverage crops. Tea is tiny. There are only 15 million acres globally. The inevitable pressure for land to feed a fast expanding population will be felt by growers cultivating luxury crops – like tea.

And tea needs quarter million metric tons of nitrogen that is manufactured every year from non-renewable oil resources, 138,000 metric tons of potassium dug up from fossil sources, and 27,500 metric tons of the world’s fast-depleting reserves of phosphorus. Conventional farming has the tools to deliver the goods, but the supplies are fast running out. Peak phosphorus comes in 2030.  However, just to emphasize one of the problems of organic farming— it would require 100 million metric tons of fresh cow manure per year to grow all our tea organically.

Sustainable systems favoring renewable and carefully husbanding non-renewables would be the preferred choice rather than unsustainable farming – but with so many more mouths to feed it’s a big ask.

STiR: You quote China’s Chairman Mao’s 1969 edict that “The only way forward for agriculture is through mechanization.”

Melican: So, China mechanized―and is now 46% mechanized. China has 19% of the world population, India contains 17%. India struggles to feed its smaller population from 11% of the world’s cultivated land while China feeds its population adequately from 7% of the world’s cultivated land according to data from the CIA World Factbook.

As soon as 2030 we should see around 85% of world’s tea being mechanically harvested, just 15% will be hand-plucked for specialty tea. Hand plucking will be 10 to 20 times as expensive as machine harvesting. There will be polarization into distinctly separate camps. Industrial tea production will be increasingly mechanized and automated for precision farming but will need volume and scale to survive on slender margins. It will increase tea yields and reduce the cost of production but at the expense of tea quality.  Industrial tea products by 2050 will be unrecognizable – leaf extracts, tea impregnated substrates, and particles fabricated from tea dust.

The specialty tea camp will retain its traditional values while embracing green sustainable credentials - the savvy producers of 2050 will build on the distinction between specialty and industrial tea – and specialty tea consumers will willingly accept the high price for quality. This will be the natural province of the artisanal tea farmer. Savvy producers will diversify and innovate to provide novelty with a high quality of both the product and of customer service. This is the future of tea.