The Rooibos South Africa Keeps for Itself

Each year South Africa drinks about 7,500 tonnes of its own rooibos (roughly 8,300 US tons), every gram of it consumed inside its own borders. In 2023 it shipped 9,970 tonnes abroad (about 11,000 US tons). Both figures sit in the same document, the South African Rooibos Council's 2024 industry information sheet, a few pages apart. Line them up and about 43 percent of the rooibos those two numbers account for never crosses a border.

The export half of that pair has a press release attached to it. Rooibos now reaches more than fifty countries, and this Ministry has filed on that at some length. The domestic half has no milestone to cross, no ceremony, and no chart. It is one sentence, in a section numbered 2.3, and it appears to have gone entirely unreported.

Three cups kept at home for every four sent abroad

Do the arithmetic slowly, because it is the whole of the story. Seven and a half thousand tonnes at home against 9,970 tonnes exported works out to about three quarters. For every four cups' worth South Africa sends to Osaka, Paris, or Hamburg, it keeps roughly three for itself. Counted as a share of the two figures combined, the home market takes about 43 percent and the export market about 57.

That is not a rounding error hiding at the bottom of a spreadsheet. It is close to half the accounted crop, and it belongs to a market that gets almost no attention, in South Africa or anywhere else, because nothing about it has ever been described as a record.

The Council's own sentence on the subject is short enough to quote whole. "The last ten years saw a strong growth in Rooibos consumption in southern Africa," it says, crediting a wider awareness of the plant's properties and "the increasing variety of products now containing Rooibos." Then: "The size of the domestic market is current estimated at 7 500 tons per annum." That is the entire public account of a market of that size. No year-by-year table, no split by province, no ranked list of who drinks the most.

The export figure gets a table, the home figure gets an estimate

Compare how the two markets are described and the reason for the silence becomes fairly plain.

For exports, the sheet gives three consecutive years of destinations, each with a rank, a country, a volume in kilograms, and a percentage of the total. It records that shipments grew from 6,552 tonnes in 2013 (about 7,200 US tons) to 9,970 tonnes in 2023. It names the top ten buyers for 2021, 2022, and 2023 separately, so you can watch positions move.

Those tables move, which is a large part of why they get written about. France does not appear anywhere in the 2021 or 2022 top ten, then arrives in 2023 in second place with 2,195,854 kilograms, 22 percent of everything shipped. Germany, meanwhile, went from 1,722,943 kilograms in 2021 to 905,219 in 2023, roughly half its volume in two years, which is a genuine change of fortune for the market that first made rooibos a European habit. A column of numbers that swings like that is a story every time it is published.

For the home market, there is an estimate. Not a measurement, an estimate, and a rounded one: the number is 7,500 rather than 7,486 or 7,522. It carries no year of its own, only the word "current," which in a document published in March 2024 means roughly then. Nothing about it can swing, because nothing about it is measured twice.

The reason for the difference is structural rather than sinister. An exported kilogram crosses a customs desk, and the desk counts it, stamps it, and files it by destination. A kilogram sold in a shop in Upington crosses nothing and is counted by nobody in particular. Export figures are a by-product of a border. Domestic figures have to be commissioned, and somebody has to want them badly enough to pay for the survey.

So the asymmetry in the coverage follows the asymmetry in the counting, which follows the asymmetry in what a border happens to do. It is not that the domestic market is small or unimportant. It is that it is administratively invisible in a way the export market cannot be.

Zambia bought more rooibos in 2023 than China or the United States

Here is where the tidy line between "home" and "abroad" starts to blur.

Look down the 2023 export table past the names you would expect. Japan is first at 28 percent, France second at 22, Germany third at 9, the Netherlands fourth at 8, the United Kingdom fifth at 5. Then, in sixth place, ahead of China and ahead of the United States, sits Zambia, at 443,148 kilograms and 4 percent of everything South Africa exported that year.

This is not a fluke of one table. The Council notes that African countries first entered the top ten in 2016, and that Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Zambia are the only ones to have held a place in that group ever since. In the 2022 figures all three appear together: Botswana seventh at 3 percent, Zambia ninth and Zimbabwe tenth at 2 percent each.

Now read the domestic sentence again with that in mind. It does not say South Africa. It says "strong growth in Rooibos consumption in southern Africa," a phrase the Council chose over the narrower one it could easily have used.

Put the two together and a reading suggests itself, one the Council does not state, offered here as inference rather than as a finding. Some meaningful share of what the statistics file under "exports" is not the red bush travelling to a distant market that discovered it. It is the same regional drinking habit continuing across a national boundary, and getting reclassified on the way. A tin bought in Gaborone counts as an export. A tin bought in Upington does not. The tea, the shopper, and the reason for the cup may be very much alike.

That does not shrink the achievement of the genuinely distant markets. Japan alone took 2,814,577 kilograms in 2023, and that is a real relationship built over decades. It does mean the popular shape of the rooibos story, a local plant that the world found and adopted, sits a little awkwardly against the industry's own numbers.

The figures do not balance, and it would be dishonest to pretend they do

Before this goes any further, a caution, because two numbers lined up neatly can imply a precision that is not there.

Add the domestic estimate to the 2023 export tonnage and you get about 17,470 tonnes. The same document puts total production at approximately 22,600 tonnes in 2022 (about 24,900 US tons). Roughly 5,100 tonnes sit unaccounted for between the two, close to a quarter of the crop.

Three things make that gap ordinary rather than mysterious. The figures are of different vintages: production is dated to 2022, exports to 2023, and the domestic estimate to no year at all. Rooibos is a dryland crop whose yield swings with the rain, so any two seasons differ. And a harvested tonne is not a sold tonne, because material is lost in processing, some is drawn off into extract rather than packed as tea, and stock carries over between seasons.

The Council's public sheet does not itemise any of that, so the three explanations above are reasonable inference and not the Council's own accounting. Better to say so plainly than to build a theory the document will not support. Take the domestic-to-export comparison as a sound shape and a fair proportion. Do not take it as a set of books that balance to the kilogram.

Eleven processors fill the local shelf and the export container alike

The industry that supplies both markets is smaller than the tonnages suggest. The Council counts about 300 commercial farmers and about 150 small-scale farmers at Wupperthal, with about 60 more at Moedverloor and Heiveld, plus roughly 80 tea courts on farms and in villages where the cut leaf is left to oxidise and dry.

Above them sit eleven processors. Eleven, for the entire crop. Five are Council members and are named in the sheet: Rooibos Limited, Cape Natural Tea Products, The Red T Company, Cape Rooibos, and Skimmelberg. The remaining seven are not Council members.

Those same eleven fill the supermarket shelf in Kimberley and the shipping container bound for Yokohama, off one harvest, graded by the same standards. Whether a given bale becomes a domestic sale or an export is a decision taken well downstream of the bush, by people who are looking at prices and orders rather than at the plant. (Who owns those farms, and why the ownership looks as it does, is a longer and less comfortable story, set down elsewhere on this site.)

Rooibos was a household habit long before it was an export line

Nothing here changes what is in your cup. It grew in the Cederberg, because that is the only place it grows, and it would have done so whether it ended up in a kitchen in Clanwilliam or a café in Kyoto. The protected name in the European Union guards the same leaf either way.

What the domestic figure quietly corrects is an assumption that has followed rooibos into most of the writing about it: that this is a South African plant the world discovered, and that the interesting part is therefore the discovery. On the industry's own numbers, close to half of the accounted crop never goes anywhere. It stays in the country that grew it, poured in the kitchens where it has been poured for several generations, while the export line climbs alongside it without ever displacing it.

The Ministry finds this a restful sort of arithmetic. Exported or not, it is the same leaf. Fill the kettle whenever it suits you. You are in company either way, and rather more of it in Upington than in Amsterdam.

Sources

1. Rooibos Industry Information Sheet 2024, South African Rooibos Council, March 2024. Section 2.2 "Rooibos at a glance" (approximately 22,600 tons total production in 2022; more than 50 export countries; about 8,000 workers) and section 2.6 "Rooibos industry structure" (about 300 commercial farmers, about 150 small-scale farmers in Wupperthal, about 60 in Moedverloor and Heiveld, about 80 tea courts, 11 processors and the five named Council members). Part 2, section 2.1 "Export per market destination 2021 to 2023" (the 2021, 2022 and 2023 top-ten destination tables, including Zambia at 443,148 kg and 4 percent in 2023, and Japan at 2,814,577 kg and 28 percent); section 2.2 "Rooibos export volumes" (6,552 tons in 2013 rising to 9,970 tons in 2023; African countries entering the top ten from 2016, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia the only ones to feature since); and section 2.3 "Domestic Rooibos Sales" (ten years of strong growth in consumption in southern Africa, and a domestic market currently estimated at 7,500 tons per annum).
2. Industry Statistics, South African Rooibos Council, the Council's standing public summary of production, employment and export reach.