News

In our hyperdesigned world, we are all guilty of judging books by their covers. Same goes for chocolate bars, packs of socks and lipsticks. It's true: Packaging can make or break a product.

Of course, this often means merely pretty things become popular instead of more worthy contenders. Fortunately, the style-minded - and high-minded - can now add ethical tea to their shopping lists.

Nourish Tea is the brainchild of Chris Draper, a 28-year-old Toronto entrepreneur who loves tea so much that he decided to make a career out of it.

"I was on a health kick and drinking tons and tons of tea. I started thinking of some kind of healthy food company I could start. And I thought, 'Tea would be neat. I could travel all over the world to source the stuff.' "

Each spring, Draper travels to such locales as China, India and Japan to buy Nourish Tea's 10 varieties of organic, fair-trade, kosher tea. The high-quality aromatic leaves are packaged in handsome 100-gram canisters with labels detailing each tea's provenance. Iron Goddess of Mercy ($7.99) is a blue tea from the mountains of China's Jianxi province, while Red Rooibus ($6.99) grows in the sandy soils of South Africa's Cedarburg Mountains.

Draper runs the fledgling company from the basement of his mother's house in north Toronto. "I'd like to go from being a basement entrepreneurial, crazy kind of guy," he says, " to turning this into a bigger, real kind of business."

Visit http://www.nourishtea.ca for a list of stores.