Tea House
Chicago Reader
Demand is doubling every month
for Shashank Goel’s organic tea, shipped direct from
his family’s plantations in India.
By Nicholas Day
July 28, 2006
ON THE KINZIE
industrial corridor, deep inside a massive warehouse
with hallways wide enough for a forklift, is the
office of Ineeka Inc.—corporate headquarters,
packing plant, and stockroom all in one tiny space.
On a recent morning four employees packed black,
green, and herbal teas as well as chais into tins
and labeled them. Another employee operated the tea
blender—a three-foot jerry-rigged orange plastic
mixer. A packing machine chugged directly outside
the office of the owner, Shashank Goel. His year old
company, which produces 14 different teas under the
labels Ineeka and Treleela, is a rocket in the
rapidly growing American artisanal tea market. This
month an herbal Treleela, spearmint lavender, won
the outstanding-beverage award at the Fancy Foods
Show in New York, the gourmet industry’s premier
convention. Juices, sodas, and chocolate drinks
usually take the top prize; it was the first tea to
win in a decade.
The black and green tea comes from
Goel’s family’s land—12,000 acres on eight organic
plantations in Darjeeling and Assam in far
northeastern India, in what are often called the
Champagne and Bordeaux regions of tea. For years the
family has sold its leaves wholesale to upscale
restaurants and tea brands; the tea from their
Ambootia estate in Darjeeling, widely considered
among the best in the world, is packaged for stores
such as Harrods in London and Mariage Freres in
Paris, the elite of tea retailers. Early last year
Goel and his wife, Sumita, who’ve lived in Chicago
since 1993, began selling tea under their own label:
the marketing of Treleela varieties, whose target is
casual consumers, is playful, that of Ineekas, aimed
at serious tea drinkers, more conventional. “This
was a dream that became a reality,” says Goel.
Years ago his New Delhi-born
parents arrived in Darjeeling with master’s degrees
in science and started managing tea estates, working
their way up from the bottom. For a time they helped
manage the Ambootia plantation, but after they left,
the soil became exhausted and yields dropped. They’d
built a good relationship with the plantation’s
employees, and Goel says that in the early 1980s
“the workers actually approached my family and said,
‘We need you to take this over.’” His parents sold
all their assets and bought it. They went back to
traditional ways of farming to rebuild the soil, and
the yields dropped further before rebounding and
then surpassing those on other plantations. Later
they learned that the way they farmed allowed them
to get their product certified as organic.
 Goel
left India after he finished college in 1988, moving
to the States to go to graduate school in
engineering at the University of Michigan. “Like
everyone else at that age, you want to do
something—my father decided that he wanted to move
to the middle of nowhere,” he says. “I decided that
I was too cool to be part of the family. I don’t
think I ever wanted to be an engineer.” He got his
master’s anyway.
When his wife enrolled at the
School of the Art Institute the couple moved to
Chicago, and in 1996 Goel took over the family’s
wholesale business, spending a lot of time traveling
around the globe selling its tea. By then the
American specialty tea market was growing at 20
percent a year, and he says companies that had great
packaging but a poor product sometimes wanted to buy
his tea. “A lot of tea companies here in the United
States talk a good game,” he says. “‘Oh, gee, we’re
the best tea company—we source from all over the
world.’ They used to call me and say, ‘You guys
produce the best teas in the world.’ But at the end
of the day they really wanted to pay $1.99”—he says
growers sell tea for as little as $1 to as much as
$2,000 per kilo—“and for $1.99 you get tea that’s
worth $1.99. And they wanted to flavor it with mango
and peach and just rubbish.”
Knowing that having his own brand
would give him greater control over the quality of
the product, along with greater financial security,
Goel eventually decided to start packaging and
selling his family’s best tea himself. The market
for organic products was hot, but he knew he could
easily back up his claim to that standard. “Every
company is using the terms ‘environmentally’ and
‘socially responsible,’” he says. “It’s like become
a fad—Boeing’s using it. So what does it really
mean?” Brian Keating of the Sage Group, a tea
market- research firm in Seattle, says there’s a lot
of opportunism in the industry—companies attempting
to exploit consumer enthusiasm for environmentally
responsible products. “It’s refreshing to see
someone saying, ‘Here’s the estate, here’s the hill
the tea came from, here are the certificates—we’ll
give you a half pound of documents,’” he says.
“We’re able to get phone numbers of people who’ve
visited the estate. They’re one of the few companies
that are transparent.” Each of the wooden boxes of
tea in the stockroom is marked with the plantation
and the specific part of the field it came from.
Goel says that from the beginning
his family has also offered the workers on their
plantations health care, schooling for their
children—attendance is mandatory—and private plots
of land where they can grow whatever they choose.
The estate contracts with the workers to buy manure
from their cows and sheep to use as fertilizer, and
it buys ginger and other products grown on those
plots for its tea blends. “We support 25,000
people,” he says. “If I don’t do what I’m doing,
there’s no subsistence for those people.” He adds
that it isn’t just about compassion—happy workers
are also good workers. He knows lots of companies
tout their fair-trade practices and charitable
donations, but, he says, “We don’t do any charities,
we don’t give profits away to so-and-so group and
so-and-so group, because at the end of the day, if
you look at these companies, how much really goes?”
Ineeka and Treleela teas have been
picked up by eco-conscious national retailers such
as Whole Foods and Wild Oats, and Goel is now hiring
sales staff to sell more locally. A few places, like
Swim Cafe on Chicago Avenue, have carried Ineeka
teas since he started making them. Its owner, Karen
Gerod, learned about the company because her husband
has a studio in the same industrial corridor. “The
quality of what they’re doing is so great,” she
says.
 She’s
also attracted by the company’s unusual tea bag. As
Goel explains, “I’d been wanting to do a retail
brand for a long time, but I didn’t want to do loose
tea—I knew Americans were still convenience focused.
I didn’t want to do a tea bag, because a tea bag—you
only put junk tea in there.” Serious drinkers shun
tea bags, which are filled with broken leaves and
tea dust. In the year before he started Ineeka, Goel
worked on what he calls the Brew Taché: a large bag
that opens and stretches over the sides of a cup,
giving the leaves inside almost as much room to
expand as in a teapot. “Good tea is like a good
wine,” he says, pointing to the bag in the cup he’s
just poured hot water into. “You need it to unfurl
completely. In a closed tea bag you can never put
that huge leaf in there, so you don’t get the top
notes.” In teaspeak, that’s the initial taste or
foreground. Keating agrees. “Anytime you have a
system that delivers longer-leaf tea,” he says, “you
absolutely get a better cup, with more complexity
and character.” He calls the tea bag and the
company’s sleek packaging, designed by Sumita,
“leading edge—it’s boutique grade.”
Ineeka’s business is now doubling
monthly. Flavored teas dominate the market, but Goel
is convinced the next consumer wave will be into
“pure stuff.” He doesn’t use flavorings or oils, as
many companies do, blending in only whole herbs and
spices. Eighty percent of the ingredients in
Ineeka’s products come from his family’s
plantations, the rest from family farms that are
also certified organic—vanilla from Madagascar,
lavender from France. Last year the company won an
Innovate Illinois award, a competition run by the
Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity to
find the state’s most innovative small businesses.
Goel says, “I won the award not because of my
gizmo”—meaning his tea bag—“but because of our
sustainability, which really is very traditional but
now has become very innovative.” At the finals, he
says, “I was the last to present, and I went up and
said, ‘I really don’t know what to say, because
there are people here that are biotech
companies—they’re fighting water pollution.’ I said,
‘I’m just a tea company. I’m not even a coffee
company.’”
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