The Rooibos Nobody Drank Is Dyeing Sneakers in Tokyo

In April 2023, ASICS put a running shoe on sale for $140 in a colorway called Rooibos, Sneaker News reported at the time¹. The name was not decoration. The uppers were dyed with leftover material from rooibos processing, the remnants that come off the line after the tea itself has been packed and sent on its way.

The method behind it is Japanese and considerably older than the shoe. It is called Ochazome, and the retailer's own listing for the shoe describes it² as boiling spent tea leaves left over from tea manufacture until the water gives up its color, then setting that color into cloth. Japan has used it on traditional textiles for a long time. Toyoshima and Co, the company that develops the dye, states it plainer still⁷: it buys up "non-standard ingredients, cut vegetable scraps" and other food waste discarded by farms and food companies, and extracts what color is left in them. The sneaker collection it belongs to includes a green colorway made from matcha and lettuce scraps. The red-brown one is its own separate blend, rooibos combined with persimmon.

The shoe's upper was made with at least 20 percent recycled cotton, and the dye took to each panel a little differently, so the canvas and the denim overlays came out at different depths of the same amber. This is the ordinary behaviour of a natural dye. It does not arrive uniform, and it was not asked to.

The color in the cloth is the color you already watch appear in the pot

Here is the fact that changes how the shoe reads. Toyoshima's own account names persimmon as rooibos's partner in the mix, so the tea is not carrying the color by itself, but its own share of it is no invention made for fabric. It draws on the same amber that develops in the leaf during post-harvest fermentation, the oxidation step that turns green rooibos into the red bush drinkers know.

That is the reddish-amber you watch bloom in a mug of an evening, spreading out from the leaf into the water while you find a coaster. Put the same chemistry against cotton instead of hot water, alongside a fruit's own color, hold it long enough, and it stays.

Nothing about the rooibos half of it is exotic. A plant that reliably gives up a warm red-brown to anything it steeps in has been asked to steep in something else, this time with company.

A steady run of red-brown garments across the last few seasons

The sneaker is not alone, which is the first sign that something more than a novelty is going on.

Quiksilver has made a rooibos-colored insulating jacket. O'Neill introduced a utility snow jacket in a colorway named Rooibos Red. Kong Running offered its Tsunami down jacket in a Rooibos option, next to a dark blue. The British label Joseph, in business since 1966, ran a Rooibos Tea range across knits, boots, scarves, dresses, blouses, sandals, leggings and trousers, all in what the house called deep amber, South African trade press recorded in a roundup of the trend⁴.

The most deliberate of them was PANGAIA. In October 2022 the brand released a capsule of its 365 sweatshirts, sweatpants, joggers and hoodies dyed with food waste, developed with the Japanese firm Toyoshima and Co, Hypebae reported at the time³. The dye drew its color from waste collected from food companies, farms and coffee houses. Matcha gave light green. Blueberry gave purple. Rooibos gave the orange-red. Prices ran from around $120 for a T-shirt to $259 for a hoodie, and the stated point of the exercise was a dye process that used less water and no harmful synthetic chemicals compared with conventional textile dyeing.

So the picture, from a distance, is tidy and pleasant. A crop grown for drinking produces a byproduct nobody wants. Somebody boils the byproduct and gets a color out of it. The color goes onto clothes that would otherwise have been dyed with something less friendly. Very little is wasted and a good many people get a nice-looking jumper.

Nobody has said where the leftovers actually come from

The South African Rooibos Council noticed, and said so. In May 2023, Adele du Toit, speaking for the Council, told South African trade press⁴ that the fashion industry's use of rooibos "has great social and economic benefits for South Africa." She separately observed⁵ that dyeing garments with non-toxic, biodegradable, eco-friendly materials could bring down the textile industry's carbon footprint.

The second half of that is a general claim about dye chemistry, and it stands on its own. The first half is the one to look at slowly.

Rooibos is grown commercially in a single narrow belt of South Africa's Western Cape, gathered around the Cederberg mountains, and nowhere else at any real scale. Every leaf in every one of those garments began in that belt, on farms of a size and a remoteness that would surprise anyone who has only met the plant in a supermarket aisle.

But a benefit to South Africa needs a route by which it arrives, and no source establishes one. None of the South African trade coverage says where the waste material is physically collected, including a separate piece syndicated the same week⁶. None of the fashion or footwear press covering the launches says either. It is not stated whether the leftovers are byproduct of processing in the Western Cape, gathered at the source and shipped to Japan, or whether they are waste generated much later and much further along, at a bottling plant or a beverage facility on another continent entirely.

Nor has anyone disclosed a payment, a licensing arrangement, or any mechanism by which money moves back toward the growers, the processors, or the region. There may be one. It has simply never been described in public. Rooibos has been down this road before with a different arrangement entirely, a co-operative's own hard-won cut of the crop's value, so the Ministry knows well enough that a stated intention and a working payment are two different documents.

So the honest reading is that two quite different stories fit the same facts. In one, a Cederberg co-operative sells a stream it used to sweep up and burn, and the money goes home. In the other, the Cederberg supplies the tea, someone abroad accumulates the spent leaf, and the value created from it stays entirely inside a Japanese and global fashion supply chain that has borrowed the plant's name and its color and owes the mountain nothing but the purchase price of the tea.

The Council's statement is warm and forward-looking, and it is not evidence of the first story. It reads as an industry body doing what an industry body does, which is to greet good news about its crop with encouragement. That is a reasonable thing for it to do. It is not the same as a demonstrated economic benefit, and the difference matters to anyone in the Cederberg deciding whether to be pleased.

None of which makes the shoes less attractive or the chemistry less sound. A dye that needs less water and no aggressive synthetics is a real improvement wherever the leaves came from. It is only that the improvement and the homecoming are separate claims, and the second one has not yet been shown.

The Ministry would be glad to be corrected on this, and will happily amend the record the day someone publishes an invoice.

Until then, one figure is settled and the rest is not. A pair of ASICS GEL-LYTE III in Rooibos cost $140 in April 2023, and the shoe carries no information at all about which farm road the leaves came down.