Brothers Chris and Lawrence Seaton brew up $3m Origin Tea empire
Two Queensland brothers are generating millions of dollars in sales each year as they make a long-held Aussie tradition ‘cool and fun’.
What started as a university project for two brothers has become a decade long career to make tea “cool and fun”.
Chris and Lawrence Seaton started Origin Tea in their Logan garage, south of Brisbane, in 2012 and have built the business — focused on the conscious consumer — into a national supplier of high quality, single-origin teas.
The teas are sold to more than 3000 businesses around Australia, including many top-tier venues and five-star resorts.
With revenue from its Australian operations around $3m, the brothers plan to grow the brand by selling direct to the consumer online, offering innovative product lines and by overseas expansion.
“We started the business because our family has connections with tea plantations in Sri Lanka and we saw a gap in the market to start offering tea with traceability and connections back to its single origin,” Chris Seaton, 30, said.
“The tea industry has been pretty stagnant and we set out to make tea cool and fun again.”
Some of the company’s teas are used with cocktails and mocktails and currently about a quarter of sales come from online.
That revenue stream is growing 100 per cent year-on-year as more people shop online.
Without even realising it, Australians will already have tried Origin Tea at their local cafe, on a flight, or when they first tried kombucha.
Now based in Berrinba in Logan, Origin Tea was the basis for the original Remedy brew, giving the brothers a front-row seat to the kombucha boom.
Partnerships with Coca-Cola, Campos and other coffee roasting businesses have seen their tea business grow.
“We are predominantly a wholesale business and just getting started on our retail journey. We see the next two to three years as being massive for us,” Chris Seaton said.
“We supply all the top venues around Australia with tea but we don’t really have that brand presence.”
With cafes representing 80 per cent of their business pre-pandemic, Covid prompted some pivots into retail, with their Sticky Chai product set to land on Coles and Woolies shelves in 2022 in a move which is set to see the business skyrocket. The majority of tea sold in Australia, especially at supermarkets, is blended and could be sourced from plantations in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka.
“We are forecasting next year for our revenue to double, basically” Chris Seaton said. “That is really our big goal for 2022.”
Lawrence Seaton, 27, said he believes tea is “the next coffee” and will see the most growth in the years to come, especially off the back of booming tea-based products such as bubble tea, iced tea, kombucha and seltzer tea.
“We see ourselves as innovators and we just launched a tea syrup for the cafe industry which sold out in a few months,” he said.
“It’s all about traceability and being able to provide great information to the customer about where the tea comes from.”
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