About Us

Established in 1999, MEM Tea Imports specializes in sourcing, blending, and distributing high quality loose leaf teas and tea-ware for the food service industry while providing ongoing support, training, and seminars for staff. Our clients include many of New England’s fine dining destination restaurants, boutique hotels, bustling cafes and busy bakeries. Our combined 65 years of experience in the Tea & Coffee industry have allowed us to develop a successful system whereby we work closely with our 400 plus customers from Boston to San Francisco, custom tailoring food service friendly tea programs while providing on-going training and support for their continued success.

We source teas from all of renowned tea-producing regions of the world: China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka & the Middle East. Our recent sourcing adventures have taken us into lesser known tea producing regions that include East Africa, remote South East Asia, South America and even here in the United States. Our strict selection criteria have remained constant and are based on three pillar principals: 1) flavor and palatably, 2) good economic value, and 3) brew-ability, or a tea’s ability to withstand the less-than-ideal brewing conditions frequently encountered in the restaurant and café environment.

More than half of the 90 teas we offer are custom blends, including many of our most popular teas. One of our carefully crafted chai blends, our only submission to the competition, recently took 2nd place at the 2011 North American Tea Championship. As part of our strict quality control standards, we taste and cup our teas and review recipes whenever new ingredients arrive and seasons change to ensure for consistency and quality throughout the year.

Perhaps the most important service that we provide our customers is on-going support and training – a service that is decidedly necessary with an ever-changing staff. We start by providing an annual review of each customer’s sales numbers, then proceed with making adjustments and tweaks to what products should be offered and carried, and finish with a training seminar for your staff. Your staff’s comfort level, knowledge, and enthusiasm with the tea program will go a long way in helping you sell more cups of tea.

We are excited by the many projects that we have on the horizon – continued exploration of newer tea growing regions, an eminent move to a larger headquarters within the year, and the arrival of our first lot of Elderflowers and Chamomile from Karnak Farms – our own farm in Saco Maine!