01/03/2026
Grateful for support from people who share our values. And even more grateful for community ❤️
Young Mountain Tea began with a promise.
While working in India to bring renewable energy to rural farming communities, Founder Raj Vable asked a mentor, while sitting in her kitchen enjoying a cup of tea, “what if we grew tea alongside the textile crops?”
“I made a promise to her right then — if she could organize farmers to grow it, I’d organize a company to sell it,” he said.
While Raj can pin down the promise as an official, actionable starting point, the story of Young Mountain Tea is the convergence of many things — big ideas and value systems steeped over years and shared between friends. It is a hopeful move toward mending a broken capitalistic system that unfairly compensates farmers, a bid for shared joy and connection, and a genuine love for the simple magic of preparing and drinking tea.
“The number one value for me is balance — for both producers and consumers,” said Raj. “But I also look at joy as a value. We want this to be a positive experience for everybody. We’re making tea that brings joy to all involved.”
While it’s always been part of his ancestral history, Raj’s personal beyond-the-surface connection to India began when he was a senior in college. His older sister was teaching in their mother’s ancestral village and her school had invested in a computer lab. But it didn’t have electricity. Having studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, Raj thought it was a problem he might be able to help solve.
“My gears started turning. I had some ideas of how we might do this,” said Raj, who got the opportunity to visit the small village near Bangalore. “So I went, and it was my first time working outside of my family’s bubble, when I really began to develop my own Indian identity.”
While there, working in rural communities on renewable energy adoption, Raj said he met a lot of incredible folks and learned a lot about himself in the process.
“It was the first time that I leveraged my own privilege to create a different pathway for someone else,” said Raj, who was born and raised in the Keweenaw and now lives in Marquette. “There is this unbelievable gulf of opportunity for people born in the US versus someone born in a village in India.”
Like the promise to his mentor, there’s another interaction he recalls, with an electrician he was working with on the renewable energy project. It’s symbolic of many others that helped build the base of the value system he carries today, the foundation of Young Mountain Tea.
“He put a bracelet on my wrist, looked at me and said ‘brother’ and it just hit me. We are all connected and dependent on each other, whether we recognize it or not,” Raj said. “India is the most populated country, and what are we missing out on when so many hundreds of millions of people who are talented and ambitious don’t have access to opportunity? This desire to create more balance became part of a value system I began to form and appreciate, which is sorely needed if we’re going to find a sense of harmony globally.”
The renewable energy work eventually led to a connection with farmers growing textile crops, and the idea to grow tea started to come to fruition after recognizing the potential in the land that, many years ago, was used to grow it. It was on another visit, part of a Fulbright Fellowship, when Young Mountain Tea was founded.
What followed was anything but linear. Raj helped secure a grant to help farmers grow the tea, and he returned to the States to do the work of creating the company. He started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to buy the season’s first harvest, which was successful.
But when Raj went back to India to collect the tea, there was none.
“It wasn’t until I got there that I was told there was no tea, it wasn’t ready.”
The trees that produce tea are pruned to size of shrub and this takes seven years. Luckily, there was another locally led farmer movement a few valleys away. Raj talked to the leader, Desmond — a third-generation tea maker, biochemist, and community leader whose life’s work had been devoted to reviving tea beyond its colonial estate model — and explained the situation.
“I drove four hours to bring a sample of white tea I had pre-sold and he said he could make it.”
Together, they found alignment. If tea was to truly support farmers, the farmers also had to own the factory, where most of the value is created. Their partnership — unexpected, cross-cultural, and grounded in shared values — became the foundation of a farmer-owned, co-created model.
Between 2021-2024 a factory was set up, funded by a USAID grant, Frontier Co-op, Young Mountain Tea, and private investments.
“It was complicated to set up, we had to navigate some weird bureaucracy, but we did it.” said Raj. “2025 was the first year the factory was up and running, which was a huge milestone for our work.”
It’s an exciting time in the tea business, said Raj. The desire by farmers in India to revive abandoned tea gardens aligned perfectly with growing interest from consumers in the US.
“We see a lot of potential,” he said. “For the first time there’s an interest in quality tea (in the US). Similar to how craft beer elevated us out of Bud(weiser) – we’re seeing the same thing with tea. There’s a demand for a wider variety so it’s a good opportunity to connect our model with the growing interest. Tea is the second most consumed beverage, so the potential for scale is great if we get it right. The stakes are high.”
Generally, people are not used to paying the real price for tea, said Raj. The general expectation from consumers is tea should be cheap, accessible, and convenient. So Raj is facing the ongoing challenge of meeting the consumer where they’re at – balancing costs on both sides so that it doesn’t become a niche product only enjoyed by those in a certain income bracket.
“We’re used to paying the price where human labor is not properly recognized. There’s a disconnect — it comes from a tree growing on the other side of the world, so it reaches our cups without us recognizing or appreciating the effort it took to get to us.”
Young Mountain tea is hoping to change that. The factory is designed to serve 500 farmers across 27 village clusters, many of them women, who are stepping into leadership roles for the first time.
One percent of all sales go back to this venture in India, giving back to farmers and strengthening the model.
“If we were just selling tea, I’d get bored quick,” said Raj. “But this is bigger — it’s a way we can make change that people understand. Tea is a great vehicle for change. There’s something unique about the power and spirit of tea. Selling tea Is not why we do our work; it’s a very unique how.”
The tea itself is 100 percent organically grown by small farmers, hand harvested from trees growing in the Himalayan Mountains. The processing is quick and simple, everything happens within 24 to 48 hours of harvest, ensuring all value addition remains local. Nothing is added, only removed. Tea is gently withered, rolled, oxidized, and dried, guided by ambient humidity and the intuition of a master tea maker.
It’s available either as loose leaf or in certified organic tea bags, which are made of sugarcane and also compostable. They’re accepted locally as compost by Partridge Creek Composting.
There’s an undeniable amount of power in something so simple, said Raj.
“It’s literally the leaves of trees, plus time, pressure, and heat,” he said. There’s a vibrational quality (referred to as ‘chi’ or ‘life energy’) when you drink it — you get a lift from the antioxidants and caffeine but a centered and grounded feeling from L-theanine.
“Your first year with tea, it’s a drink. The second year, it’s medicine. The third year — magic.”
As Young Mountain Tea continues to grow, Raj says the work remains rooted in that first promise — to build something that honors fairness, balance, joy, and connection.
Years after that first kitchen table promise, thousands of tea plants are thriving in once abandoned soil, cultivated by farmers who are proudly shaping their own futures and rebalancing how value is shared. And cups across the world are filled with the warm, comforting proof of that transformation.
The Co-op carries several loose leaf and individually bagged varieties from Young Mountain Tea. Enjoy 20 percent off all products through January.
