Starting where it counts
Every day we are constantly asking ourselves ... Where can we take on greater responsibility in what we do and make our own contribution to a better environment? And our answer is that we do our best where we know our way around – and that’s with our teas. So today already we are the German tea brand that is able to offer an extensive range of sustainably cultivated products.
Sustainable Cultivation
To ensure that our raw ingredients are responsibly and sustainably produced, we rely on powerful partners such as the Ethical Tea Partnership, Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade. They support the growers in their regions in solving social and environmental challenges and laying the foundations for sustainable produce.
Our route to sustainability
Sustainability became a fixed part of the Meßmer brand strategy. We were the first German company to join the Ethical Tea Partnership and we consequently committed ourselves to its objectives to improve the working conditions, living conditions and environmental conditions in the tea industry supply chain.
2015 was a groundbreaking year for us, with many milestones: As pioneers in the market, we were already sourcing 30% of our raw ingredients from sustainable cultivation. Together with our partners, we also succeeded in sourcing more sustainably cultivated fruit and herbal infusions for the first time. Our sustainable range also became available in Switzerland. We published our sustainability strategy – with all our areas of activity, objectives and everything that we had achieved to date – in our first Sustainability Report.
We increased our raw ingredients from more sustainable cultivation to 50%.
We were getting even closer to our target and were now already sourcing 50 to 70% of our raw ingredients from more sustainable cultivation. At the same time, we began selling our sustainable teas in Austria.
2021 Offsetting our CO2 emissions
We made our German locations climate-neutral for the first time in our 2020 financial year. After having significantly reduced our greenhouse gas emissions through a number of different measures, we offset the CO2 emissions that we could not avoid or reduce through compensation payments in international climate protection projects.
Our objective is 100 % sustainable raw ingredients by 2030
We want to source our entire product range exclusively from sustainable cultivation and configure all the stages in our supply chain in a sustainable way. That forms the basis of our day-to-day work and our corporate decision-making..
Environmental and Climate Protection
As a tea producer, we work with natural raw ingredients – and are consequently highly dependent on an unspoilt environment. That is why we are committed to the long term protection of our natural environment, are careful to conserve our resources and continuously reduce our energy consumption.
Nature conservation in cultivation
Changing climatic conditions and increasingly extreme weather conditions are having a significant impact on the quality and availability of our raw ingredients. That is why we support the fight against soil erosion, less water consumption and the conservation of natural biodiversity in the growing regions.
CO2 reduction
We want to contribute to achieving national and international climate objectives and we have been monitoring our corporate carbon footprint since 2010. Since then we have been able to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by around half. Since 2015 we have been supplying all our German locations with 100% green energy and supporting international environmental projects with payments to compensate for the CO2 emissions that come from our production processes.
Environmentally friendly packaging
We do not just ensure the safety and quality of our teas with our packaging, we are also making a contribution to protecting the environment. We work continuously to make our packaging even more sustainable and have already achieved a number of things.
Compostable teabags
We use renewable materials to make our teabags – including banana fibres or cotton, for example, for the production of the threads – so they can easily be composted. The thread and the label are now fixed directly to the teabag by means of a knot, so we no longer need any metal staples.
Packaging from recycled materials
For additional protection of the flavours, the teabags are packed in their familiar envelopes that are not glued, but folded, together. We use almost exclusively renewable materials to make both the envelopes and the folding boxes that finally find their way onto the tea shelf. The boxes are made of 60 per cent recycled materials, while we are currently unable to sustainably replace small elements such as glue – which ensures a good seal and protection of the tea. We also take environmental protection into account with our shipping cartons and supermarket displays – where we use 95 per cent recycled material and, as far as possible, use assembly structures that don’t need any glue. So our packaging is carefully considered at all levels.
