Today we’d like to introduce you to Julia Mader.
Hi Julia, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
When I was a teenager I had the privilege to visit Japan. That was the beginning of my obsession with tea. I studied global food issues in college and was inspired to lean more deeply into the food industry because of it’s importance on the environment, culture, and communities. I worked for local food deliver companies in Austin and I was trying to figure out how I could contribute to the local food scene in a way that had not been done yet and in a space that I really loved. In 2014, I started playing with different chai recipes in my kitchen and created our first brew, Sweet Fennel Chai. I took glass amber bottles to the biggest cafes in town and they all signed up pretty quickly. All of a sudden I had a business and was going out each day to deliver samples to cafes and brewing chai at night in a commercial kitchen. My business partner would juice around 50 lbs of organic ginger root that we would buy from Brothers produce and I would be boiling 20 gallons of water and steeping the freshly blended spices inside of organic cotton tea bags the size of pillow cases.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
We have had several obstacles that have taken lots of trial and error to solve. The first one was trying to get a stable shelf life for our chai. We sent our chai to food scientists and and eventually ended up having our tea brewed at a large facility in Colorado for a short time. The biggest obstacle was figuring out how to keep our chai super fresh, the flavors bright and to get our chai out of single-use plastic bottles. About 5 years in to Evergreen Chai we reformulated all of our chai recipes from a liquid concentrate to a dry blend of organic ground spices, steam distilled herbs, and pesticide free black tea so that our chai could be water-soluble, made quickly on the spot by cafes and highly versatile.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Our chai really stands out for several reasons. The first is that because our formulations have organic, steamed-distilled, freeze dried herbs cafes get to simply add hot water to reawaken those spices into a truly freshly brewed chai – right in their cafe. We also use only compostable packaging that will biodegrade, helping cafes to minimize their storage needs and their waste. We also donate 5% to forest preservation each year and have been able to be a part of some really great projects with The Rainforest Alliance that have saved rainforest habitat in this crucial time. All of the tea & matcha we choose to sell is pesticide-free. This is really important since the entire leaf is consumed when drinking matcha and our chai.
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
With our compostable pouches, our chai has to date, saved approx. 150K single use plastic bottles used by cafes (since most chai brands package their chai in plastic bottles).
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.evergreenchai.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/evergreenchai/
