Ministry of Rooibos Open till four Search

Articles

Longer pieces, with their sources.

  1. The trade The trade · A 1933 Tea Sample Still Matches Today’s Cup A 2019 chemical analysis of thirty-seven tea samples set aside in 1933 found that the fingerprint of that decades-old rooibos and a commercial tea from 2016 are virtually identical, and it finally identified a forgotten reed tea from the same box as a completely different plant still drunk today at Wupperthal.
  2. The trade · Some of the Oldest Rooibos Never Reached a Cup The earliest documented Khoi and San use of rooibos was not only a drink. It was something you put on your skin, and the record of that use is older than the industry that grew from it.
  3. The trade · The Rooibos South Africa Keeps for Itself Rooibos exports get the coverage: a record year, a protected name in Europe, buyers in more than fifty countries. The quieter figure in the same industry document is that roughly two fifths of the crop the numbers account for never crosses a border at all.
  4. The trade The trade · The Rooibos Patents Nestlé Quietly Let Lapse In 2008 a Nestlé subsidiary filed five patents on rooibos and honeybush without the permit South African law required. None of them survive today, and the reason they vanished is quieter than most people expect.
  5. The trade · The Farmer Who Bought Back the Farm He Worked for Wages Jacobus Koopman used a government land-reform loan to buy the Suid Bokkeveld farm where he had worked for wages. He and thirteen neighbours turned that into Heiveld, an organic rooibos co-operative that later had to defend its independence from its own government.
  6. The trade The trade · Rooibos’s Monopoly Ended in 1993. It Had a Private Sequel In 2017 South Africa's competition regulator accused the private company that inherited rooibos's old state monopoly of using exclusive farmer contracts to hold the same grip the 1954 law once guaranteed by decree.
  7. The trade · Rooibos Was Sold as Healthy Before a Mother’s Colic Claim Rooibos was sold as healthy from at least 1907. Its reputation as a remedy for colic and allergy in babies began in 1968 with one mother's story, which the Rooibos Tea Control Board turned into a national campaign.
  8. The trade · How Rooibos Became a Crop, With Help From an Ant Heap Before rooibos could be farmed, its seed had to be found and coaxed to sprout. The answer ran through a Clanwilliam doctor, a hard seed coat, and a colony of seed-hoarding ants.
  9. The trade · Rooibos Pays the Khoi and San for Their Knowledge Since 2019 the rooibos industry has paid the Khoi and San a share of its earnings for the knowledge that the red bush makes a drink. Here is how that came about, how the levy works, and the argument that it does not go far enough.
  10. The trade The trade · Who Gets to Call It Rooibos? The Fight for a Plant’s Name A Texan company spent four years demanding money from anyone who used the word "rooibos" to sell tea, until a US court struck its trademark down. Here is how South Africa lost the name, won it back, and built three separate legal shields so it could never happen again.
  11. The trade The trade · The Board That Owned Rooibos for Forty Years From 1954 to 1993, one government board was the only legal buyer and the only legal seller of rooibos in South Africa, and it built that monopoly on a rule that quietly shut coloured growers out. Here is how that came to be, and what it left behind.
  12. The trade · The World Wants Your Cup. Only One Valley Pours It. Rooibos exports passed 10,000 tonnes for the first time in 2025, reaching more than 50 countries, even as the harvest behind it shrank. Here is what that means for the cup in your own hands, and why the Ministry is not worried.
  13. The trade · The Wartime Rooibos Boom the Record Cannot Quite Confirm Every rooibos history repeats the same line, that a wartime tea shortage turned South Africa onto the red bush. The shortage is well documented. The rooibos surge it supposedly caused is far thinner on paper, and here is what the record does and does not support.
  14. The trade · Three Different Promises on a Rooibos Label Organic, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance are three different promises on a rooibos label, not one certification. Here is what each stamp verifies, and what predicts which farmers hold one.
  15. The trade · Nobody Has Ever Auctioned a Kilogram of Rooibos Nearly every major tea in the world passes through a public auction where buyers bid in the open. Rooibos never has. Here is how its price actually gets set, and why the gap has never been filled.
  16. The trade The trade · The Biggest Rooibos Market on Earth Never Grew a Single Bush For nearly sixty years the country that bought and resold more rooibos than any other on earth was Germany, which cannot grow a stem of it. How a health-food house sold the tea under a Kilimanjaro logo, how Hamburg became the trade's logistics hub, and why Japan finally took the crown.
  17. The trade · Four Times Someone Tried to Own the Word Rooibos The famous fight over the word "rooibos" ran from 1993 to 2005 in a US courtroom. It was not the first attempt to own the name, and it was not the last. Here are the other three, including the one the industry's own founding family gave back on its own.
  18. The trade · The Red Bush Two Different Histories Both Call Home In South Africa's Cederberg, white Afrikaans commercial growers and coloured smallholders come from opposite sides of the region's history, yet both point to the same fact, that rooibos grows nowhere else on Earth, as the reason they themselves belong to this land.
  19. The trade The trade · Japan Boycotted Apartheid and Bought the Rooibos Anyway How the red bush reached what is now its largest market, straight through a contradiction the trade was built on.