Reem Hassani predicted the artisanal coffee movement would also happen to tea.
Reem Hassani · Numi Organic Tea: Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim · Jul 5, 2021 · at 33:08
Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim, co-founders of Numi Organic Tea, discuss their foundational pitch in the late 1990s as the third wave of specialty coffee took off.
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“We kept pitching the idea that what's happening to coffee is going to happen to tea. So that The connoisseurship and kind of the gourmetship of, if that's a word, of coffee is going to happen to tea. So we're just going to ride that wave.”
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The co-founders' father bailed out Numi using his pension plan.
“Our dad kind of bailed us out on several occasions because summers were really tight, tea season isn't until the fall, and you have to buy all your teas in the summer, so he would bail us out with his pension plan”
Reem Hassani decided to import traditional Middle Eastern dried lime tea.
“And so one of them was this dry desert lime that we drank as kids called Numi Basra, and, you know, that we'd always talked about in the family, somebody should import this tea. ... And I was like, okay, that's what I'm going to do.”