Tagged: rooibos tea control board

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.

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.

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.