Raising the bar on contaminant reduction
Camellia sinensis, fruits, spices, and herbs all provide natural, healthy ingredients for our range of teas and infusions. The quality and purity of these ingredients are essential for maximising their benefits and ensuring the highest standards of consumer safety. In line with our vision of serving healthier, tastier teas, we continue advancing our roadmap to measure, monitor, and minimise contaminants that might potentially affect our products. These include pesticides, metal elements in the soil, and weeds such as pyrrolizidine and tropane alkaloids. Having deployed Integrated Pest Management (IPM) techniques to eliminate pesticides, including glyphosate, across 8 000 hectares of East African tea estates, our teams spent 2024 further developing the capabilities and tools to drive continued progress on contaminant mitigation.
Since the formation of LIPTON Teas and Infusions in 2022, our focused quality improvement programme has supported a shift to superior sourcing origins. In 2024, we continued enhancing the precision of our screening methodologies, moving from country level categorisation to localised, real-time data. This shift will be supported by implementing digital dashboards powered by our business intelligence software in 2025. During the year under review, we also continued engaging with growers, suppliers, industry associates, and scientific partners to share a broad range of agricultural best practices, including our IPM expertise. Meanwhile, we are developing a range of proprietary blends crafted according to what we call ‘Pristine Standards’.
These blends, which fully eliminate highest-risk origins, highlight quality, sustainability, and relevant health benefits.
To protect consumer health, the EU mandates maximum residue levels (MRLs) of pesticides that are legally tolerated in food and feed. While these regulations are some of the strictest in the world, we are determined to go even further. In 2024, we further enhanced our measurement techniques and implemented updated standards with fruit and herbal ingredient suppliers, including MartinBauer and dsm-firmenich. These efforts make our standard stricter than EU MRL requirements by between 50% and 75%. Going forward, we will deepen our collaboration with stakeholders and incorporate cutting-edge data science to ensure that consumers receive the safe and healthy products they deserve.