Producer
Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA)
Management agency for ~600,000 Kenyan smallholder tea farmers; world's largest producer of black tea by this structure.
1
Inputs supplied
1
Goods downstream
0
Facilities
0
Stories
What they make
1 input Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) supplies
Click an input to see every good that depends on it, every country that produces it, and every other company in the supply chain.
Where it shows up
Goods downstream
Essential goods that depend on something Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) makes — pick one to see the full supply chain.
What else they do
Business segments
The company's full revenue map — where this supply-chain role fits within their broader business.
Smallholder tea management
Tea processing
Marketing & export
Farmer services
Intelligence
What's known
Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains — chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.
Concentration2024
The everyday black tea in a Western teabag — Lipton, PG Tips, Tetley — is, more than people realize, Kenyan. Kenya is the world's largest exporter of black tea, and the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA) organizes the roughly 600,000 smallholder farmers who grow much of it, running the factories and channeling their leaf into the global blends. So "English breakfast" or "British" tea is largely an African product, blended in Europe from Kenyan (and Indian and Sri Lankan) leaf. The world's most popular drink after water rests on a concentrated set of origins, and KTDA's smallholders are one of the biggest. The national-identity branding of tea — its Englishness — hides an African agricultural supply chain that most tea-drinkers never picture, and a single Kenyan agency sits behind a remarkable share of the world's daily cups.
Kenya Tea Development Agency ↗Did you know2024
Tea's supply chain is unusually exposed because it depends on huge numbers of smallholder farmers in specific highland climates. Kenyan tea has been hit by frost, drought and shifting rainfall, and climate change threatens the narrow temperature-and-altitude band where quality tea grows — so the world's tea supply, and the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmers, are directly climate-vulnerable, with prices swinging through the Mombasa auction on weather and demand. So a cup of tea connects a Western consumer to climate risk and smallholder economics in the Kenyan highlands, and KTDA's cooperative structure is both a buffer (collective scale for tiny farmers) and a concentration (one agency, one region, one climate band). The humble teabag is an agricultural-and-climate story wearing a national costume — and as the climate shifts, the geography of where tea can be grown, and who depends on it, may shift with it.
Kenya Tea Development Agency ↗