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.
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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.
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.”
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.’”
