Tagged: south africa
Who Gets to Call It Rooibos? The Fight to Protect a Plant's Own 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.
Three Different Promises on a Rooibos Label, and Why Most Tins Carry None
Organic, Fair Trade, and Rainforest Alliance are three different promises on a rooibos label, not one certification, and the industry's own count of who holds them is smaller than most drinkers would guess. Here is what each stamp verifies, and what really decides which farmers can afford to earn it.
Rooibos and Honeybush Are Not Cousins, Not Really
Both are caffeine-free, both grow only in the Cape, and both get called "the other South African tea." Past that, they are two different plants from two different tribes of the legume family, two different mountain ranges, and two different antioxidants, and the historical record on how each was actually brewed is stranger than either box on the shelf lets on.
More of the Cederberg Is Under a Conservation Pact Than Under Rooibos
Rooibos farms in the Cederberg have signed more land into formal conservation agreements than the entire industry cultivates, a corridor that also keeps a camera-trapped leopard population, a dying cedar, and the plant's own wild backup moving.