The Biggest Rooibos Market on Earth Never Grew a Single Bush

Ask where rooibos is grown and the answer is easy: the Cederberg, and nowhere else that matters. Ask which country did more than any other to turn it into a drink the rest of the world actually buys, and the honest answer for the better part of sixty years was not South Africa at all. It was Germany, a country that has never grown a single rooibos bush. From the mid-1960s until Japan's imports overtook it, more rooibos passed through German hands than through anyone else's, and for part of that stretch it was sold there under a name and a mountain that belonged to a different country entirely, a fuller story than the export figures reported before alone can tell.

A Hamburg herb dealer nobody could interest in the stuff

The story starts with a mail-order business, not a trading house. In 1907 Hermann Alois Mayer opened a medicinal-herbs mail-order firm in Hamburg that grew into Kräuter-Mayer, and by the late 1920s the company was substantial enough that a South African commercial agent brought its buyers samples of the Cape's own herbal infusion. The reception was polite and final: German tea merchants had learned during the First World War's shortages to distrust a substitute, and Kräuter-Mayer's own trade was told plainly that if Germans bought tea at all, it had to be of the best kind. The firm did try rooibos once, holding six tonnes of it (about six and a half US tons) through the last stretch of that war and advertising it hard, only to find its customers did not care for the taste and let the stock go once people would drink almost anything. (A companion piece on this site has already traced the exact dating of that particular wartime tale, which popular retellings often misplace a war later than it belongs.) Real German interest in rooibos did not arrive for another two decades.

A health-food house that put a mountain on the box

The interest, when it finally came, came from naturopathy. Salus Haus, a company that helped build Germany's modern market for natural health products, was already selling rooibos by the 1950s, and the Rooibos Tea Control Board, then the sole legal seller of the crop, granted the firm exclusive rights to the German market. Rather than picture the mountains where it actually grows on the pack, Salus Haus commissioned a drawing of Mount Kilimanjaro and sold the tea as "Massai Tea," named, as Boris Gorelik's history of the trade dryly notes, for an East African people who lived nowhere near a rooibos bush. Gorelik allows for the plainer explanation too: it may simply have sold better to suggest an East African origin than to name the country that grew it, South Africa, in the decade the Nationalist government was writing its apartheid laws into force. Either way, the plant that reached West German shelves first did so wearing another country's mountain.

A consulate begging a trade body to answer its mail

Whatever the pack said, the volumes stayed tiny for years. By the mid-1960s Germany had already become rooibos's biggest importing country, and that claim is smaller than it sounds: the whole German trade was thin enough that South African diplomats were sent back into the promotion business a second time, with the consulate in Cologne writing directly to the German Tea Importers' Association to ask for buyers. The association circulated an illustrated information sheet to its own members. By Gorelik's account, nobody replied. Germany held the title of the world's largest rooibos market for years while the market itself was barely worth writing a form letter about.

From an insider's tip to ten percent of the cup

The turn came a decade later, and it came from the shape of German retail rather than from rooibos itself. Specialty tea shops multiplied across the country from the early 1970s, stocking black, green, and herbal infusions together, and rooibos rode in on that wider fashion for loose-leaf tea rather than arriving as a category of its own. By the century's end the shift had compounded: a German Tea Council poll in 2000 found strong consumer demand, and German trading houses were by then buying roughly three-quarters of all the rooibos the world exported, reselling perhaps a third of that on again to buyers elsewhere. That turned Germany into the overseas logistics hub the rest of the rooibos business ran through, in the trade's own description: most of the world's rooibos passed through German hands on its way to buyers elsewhere.

The last mainstream push had a brand name and a television budget behind it. In 2002 Teekanne, then Germany's second-largest tea brand, put rooibos on TV for the first time, pitching it to parents as a caffeine-free drink safe enough for children even at bedtime. It worked. By the researcher Tobias Gress's account in a 2004 thesis on the German market, rooibos had gone "from an insider's tip to a shooting star," turning up in supermarkets, discount chains, health-food shops, dedicated tea shops, and even petrol stations, and settling in at roughly a tenth of all the tea Germans drank. None of that required a single hectare to be planted anywhere near Hamburg. It required a licence, a mountain on a box that had nothing to do with the plant inside it, one unanswered circular, and then a nation of tea-shop customers and, eventually, worried parents.

Where the title actually sits today

This is not ancient history in some other country. The trade data can date the change. Germans still drink a real amount of rooibos, an estimated 2,700 tonnes each year (about 3,000 US tons) by the country's own tea association, a little over sixteen cups for every person in the country, which makes it the fourth most popular herbal infusion behind peppermint, chamomile, and fennel; most of what is sold there now comes flavored or blended rather than plain. But the crown itself has moved. Official trade figures show German import volumes falling from 2,139 tonnes in 2019 (about 2,350 US tons) to 1,722 tonnes in 2021 (about 1,900 US tons), while Japan's imports reached 2,175 tonnes (about 2,400 US tons) in 2020 and 2,556 tonnes (about 2,800 US tons) in 2021, the highest of any country in both years by the South African Rooibos Council's figures. Japan, not Germany, had become the world's largest single buyer by 2020, and it still leads. The reasons South Africa's own harvest and export figures look the way they do today rest partly on that handoff.

The market that never grew it

The market that made rooibos a genuinely global drink was never the market that grew it, and for a long stretch of that history it was not honest, on the label, about which country the tea had actually come from. Salus still sells a Massai rooibos today, and the leaf in it, like all rooibos, is grown in just one corner of South Africa's Western Cape and will take root nowhere else.

Sources

1. Rooibos Importers: Germany, Klipopmekaar (an extract of Boris Gorelik's The Rooibos Story, South African Rooibos Council), on Kräuter-Mayer's 1907 founding and wartime rooibos stock, Salus Haus's exclusive licence and Massai Tea rebrand, the 1960s consulate promotion effort, the 1970s tea-shop expansion, the 2000 poll, the Teekanne 2002 campaign, and current German consumption figures.
2. The Rooibos Marketplace, Klipopmekaar, on the German and Japanese import-volume figures for 2019 to 2021 and Japan holding the highest volumes in both 2020 and 2021, sourced to South African Rooibos Council fact sheets and Perishable Products Export Control Board data.
3. Industry Statistics, South African Rooibos Council, on the largest rooibos-importing countries (Japan first among them) as of 2023.
4. The Rooibos Story, Boris Gorelik, South African Rooibos Council, the commissioned history from which the German-market account above is drawn.