Simply Darjeeling!

Our parent company, Teekampagne, and its founder, Guenter Faltin, were among the three companies honored at the ceremony for the Deutscher Gruenderpreis 2009, the most important award for outstanding entrepreneurs in Germany. Winners received their awards in Berlin, at a ceremony attended by Commerce Secretary Guttenberg and many other prominent figures from business and politics. Both “stern” magazine and German public TV channel ZDF have been carrying reports on the nominees and prize winners.

Faltin, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Free University of Berlin, started Teekampagne 25 years ago, to demonstrate that his ideas could succeed in the marketplace. Teekampagne sells only one kind of tea, Darjeeling, in large packages and by mail order, at tremendous savings to the consumer. Its tea is 100% Darjeeling, guaranteed by the official Seal of Purity from the Tea Board of India; it is subject to an extraordinary quality assurance protocol (among other things, it is tested for hundreds of herbicides and pesticides, with the results printed on each package, and it is traceable to its origins). Teekampagne also funds a reforestation project in Darjeeling, carried out locally by the World Wide Fund for Nature. A model company not only for its entrepreneurial idea but also for its ecological leadership, Teekampagne has a loyal following in Europe, where it sells about 400 tons of tea a year.

Faltin has been a business angel for a variety of successful startups as well as a widely read author and consultant on entrepreneurship. His latest book, Kopf schlaegt Kapital (“Brain Beats Capital”) is among the best-selling business books in Germany this year.

“A teacupful of medicine? Green tea has held a long-standing place in traditional Asian medicine. Scientific research is now beginning to explain why” – this is the title of the editorial published in the June 2008 issue of the medical journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. A new study in the journal discusses the effects of the polyphenol most abundant in green tea, (-) –epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Erich Wanker and colleagues at the Max Delbrück Institute for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch, Germany have looked at the effect this substance has on the formation of certain fibrils associated with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. According to the editorial cited above, these “new findings suggest that EGCG may prevent toxic fibril formation” (p. 537).

These findings follow on the heels of another story. In the September 2007 issue of Blood: Journal of the American Society of Hematology a scientific letter appeared about the possible effectiveness of green tea in curing amyloidosis, a medical condition in which amyloid proteins are abnormally deposited in organs and tissues of the body. The author Werner Hunstein, a renowned professor emeritus of hematology (University of Heidelberg), who suffers from amyloidosis himself, traces the effects of green tea in improving his own illness. Hunstein was diagnosed with amyloidosis in 2001, and the aggressive chemotherapy treatment that followed left him shattered. That he managed to recover his strength and go back to normal in his daily life, Hunstein attributes to green tea. When he began to drink large amounts of green tea (usually about two quarts per day), his condition improved significantly; the deposition of amyloid proteins was stopped, and his heart resumed beating more strongly.

Needless to say, he also believed in drinking clean tea. The tea Professor Hunstein drank was the Green Darjeeling from Teekampagne / Tea Campaign.

Now available from our web site:

> Darjeeling First Flush, Garden Tea, from the Pussimbing Estate, 250g;

> Darjeeling Second Flush, Blend from Tea Gardens of the Chamong Group, 250g.

To order, please go to our secure online store or call us toll-free at 877-BTC-TEAS.

Among project SERVE’s ecological activities in Darjeeling is the planting of shade trees. Tea bushes require shade. It boosts the flavor, the color, and the yield of the tea harvested. Project SERVE, in cooperation with the WWF India, has been planting different species of shade trees to improve the biodiversity of the tea gardens. The tree seedlings are raised in the project’s own nursery. 70,000 shade trees were planted in 2007.

Read more under ‘Green Commitment‘ and in upcoming blog entries.

(Source: Annual Activity Report, 2007)

Replanting trees is one major activity of project SERVE. It is essential for reversing soil erosion on the steep slopes of Darjeeling. Degraded areas are identified and surveyed, weeds are cleaned away, and pits dug before the monsoon rain starts. Seedlings are raised in the project’s own nursery and supplied through local committees or groups.

82,500 seedlings were planted in 2007.

(Source: Annual Activity Report 2007).