When they arrive, our teams set them in long rows, carefully slurping and assessing them in their hundreds, before selecting the very best to buy for our blends. In fact, our buyers often taste up to a thousand samples a day, in their constant pursuit of the very best flavour and quality.

Whilst their official industry job title is “tea buyer” and “coffee buyer”, the name doesn’t really sum up everything they do. It takes years of training, tasting and travelling the world before our trainee buyers get to drop the 'trainee' from their titles – and they never stop learning. Professional taste buds really are a serious business.

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It gets especially serious in the world of coffee, where we ask our team to sit their “Q Graders” exams. These famously difficult qualifications are the highest marker of quality control, certified by the Coffee Quality Institute (a notoriously hard-to-please bunch). We’re proud to say that we have numerous Q Graders on our team, along with a World Barista Champion medallist.

And of course, our buyers don’t only taste test the teas and coffees they buy; they are just as rigorous in how they test our finished products before they leave the building for stores around the world. They taste test every batch we produce in all the ways our consumers around the world may drink it - with milk, without milk, in hard and soft water - to make sure it’s always perfect.

Taylors Expertise

Alongside all that tasting, travel is a crucial part of our buyers’ job. Relationships are at the heart of how we do business, and spending time with our partners around the world face-to-face is very important to us.

That’s why our buyers regularly travel to visit the farms, estates and gardens that grow our tea and coffee. By going in person, seeing the fields and factories and washing stations, and meeting face to face, we can build a real rapport. Travel deepens our connection with our trading partners and enables us to build honest, respectful relationships.

We build a foundation of strong, long-term relationships with our partners and their communities – over years, sometimes decades – because we want the way we trade to be honest, fair and sustainable. So we invest in projects which will help producers’ lives and livelihoods, because we know that makes a positive difference at every step of the chain: to the lives and incomes of the people who grow our tea and coffee, to the quality of their crops, the quality of our products and the experience of the people who enjoy drinking our teas and coffees around the world.

Our tea and coffee buyers’ expertise and commitment to quality, together with our unique sourcing approach, is how we’ve earned our place as the UK’s No.1 black tea and UK’s No.1 roast and ground coffee brand.

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Tea and coffee has been what we do for a very long time, so we do it properly.