🇨🇦 Proudly Canadian: How We’re Blending Tea Close to Home

There is a lot about a cup of Pluck Tea that happens much closer to home than you may think.

Since Pluck was founded in Toronto in 2012, we’ve believed that where and how we make our tea matters. From hand-blending in our own facility to working with Canadian farmers, food makers, and packaging suppliers, we’re always looking for ways to keep more of our supply chain close to home.

It helps us make fresher, better tea, reduce unnecessary transportation, support Canadian businesses, and build stronger relationships with the people behind our ingredients.

Blended and Packed in Toronto

Every Pluck blend is made in small batches by our team at our own Toronto facility.

Rather than importing finished blends made elsewhere, we source ingredients and bring them together here. Hand-blending allows our tea makers to assess ingredients and finished batches for freshness, colour, quality, and consistency while minimizing damage to premium whole tea leaves.

Keeping production close to our largest concentration of customers also helps reduce unnecessary transportation. Our production space uses natural light from skylights, supplemented by energy-efficient LED lighting when additional light is needed. We also introduced and continue to lead the recycling program for our building.

For us, sustainability starts at home.

Canadian Ingredients, Grown Closer to Home

While Camellia sinensis - the plant responsible for black, green, white, and oolong tea - doesn't grow commercially in Canada, many of the fruits, herbs, botanicals, and other ingredients we blend with it certainly do.

Over the years, we've built relationships with growers and producers across the country to bring more Canadian-grown ingredients into our teas.

This includes Ontario lavender, ginseng, apples, mint and Nova Scotia cranberries and blueberries, and other ingredients grown and produced across Canada.

One of our favourite examples is our relationship with Martin's Family Fruit Farm in Ontario. Apples that don't meet conventional retail specifications can be transformed into beautiful dried apple pieces for our blends instead.

Local sourcing isn't simply about putting a maple leaf on the package. It allows us to support Canadian agriculture, shorten supply chains where possible, and create teas that have a genuine connection to the places around us. 

Explore all of our blends featuring Canadian-sourced ingredients →

Upcycling With Local Food Makers

Some of our most interesting ingredients start somewhere unexpected.

Rather than always turning to international ingredient wholesalers, we work with local Canadian food makers to find opportunities to give premium ingredients another purpose.

Citrus peels from a local organic juice maker can be carefully saved, reformatted, and dried to our specifications before finding their way into our tea blends. Cacao shells from a Toronto bean-to-bar chocolate maker can become a delicious addition to teas like Chocolate Chai and After Dinner Mint.

These partnerships help us make use of flavourful ingredients already moving through our local food system while reducing food waste and our reliance on ingredients shipped from farther away.

Turns out, upcycling can be pretty delicious.

Canadian Packaging, Too

Our commitment to Canadian sourcing goes beyond what's inside the tea.

Whenever possible, we work with Canadian suppliers for our pouches, cartons, labels, shipping boxes, and other packaging materials. Keeping these relationships closer to home supports fellow Canadian businesses while helping us reduce the distance materials travel before they reach our Toronto facility.

It's one more way we can look at the full journey of our tea - not just the ingredients in the cup.

Thinking Beyond Canada

Being proudly Canadian doesn't mean our responsibility stops at the border.

Tea is a global agricultural product, and our relationships with tea-growing communities around the world are an essential part of what we do. We prioritize direct relationships with producers wherever possible, including long-standing partnerships in Japan and Rwanda. 

We're also working to address plastic beyond our own operations through our partnership with CleanHub. Plastic recovery helps prevent plastic from entering waterways while supporting safe, fairly paid employment in coastal communities. 

Because the first ingredient in every cup of tea is water - and protecting it matters to us.

View our live tracker here →

Canadian Made, From Our Team to Your Cup

For us, being a Canadian tea company is about more than where our headquarters happen to be.

It's about choosing to make our teas here. Employing a local team of tea makers. Building relationships with Canadian farmers and food producers. Finding creative new uses for local ingredients. Working with Canadian packaging suppliers. And continually looking for opportunities to make a better cup with a lighter footprint.

Some ingredients will always travel a long way to reach us - that's the beautiful reality of tea. But wherever we can make the journey shorter, more thoughtful, and more connected, we will.

Proudly blended and packed in Canada, with ingredients and ideas sourced close to home whenever possible.

Explore all of our blends featuring Canadian-sourced ingredients →