From the Cinnamon Horchata blend that offers instant warmth with its green and black teas carrying the flavors of spices and toasted brown rice, to the temporary passport to a sunny beach stamped by Storehouse’s Tropical Moringa Botanical blend with apple and hibiscus, any tea drinker can taste the thought and care they put into crafting teas.
In 2007, when Paula opened Storehouse Tea, she was hand blending her organic Fair Trade tea leaves out of a church kitchen. “The first five years it was my kind of side hustle, making sure that it really was going to be lucrative and a sustainable business that made sense,” she recalls. Paula’s husband Dan later joined the company to manage the business side.
Where Campus and Community Come Together
While professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio had already been buying from Storehouse Tea for events for many years, the brand had also begun gaining attention within the Bon Appétit network through a small account nearby. It wasn’t until September 2023, though, that Bon Appétit began partnering with Storehouse Tea as a Farm to Fork vendor for the university.
“We started using Paula and Dan’s tea because a lot of students started asking where they could go buy local Fair Trade tea that’s a really good product,” says Lauren Varvir, a senior marketing specialist for Bon Appétit at CWRU. “We wanted something students could go buy both on campus and if they wanted to check out different parts of the Cleveland community, they could find their storefront over in Lakewood.”
But students eager to work on projects with real companies have been connecting with Storehouse Tea since before the partnership with Bon Appétit. The most recent success is the inventory system students helped develop that Paula and Dan will launch this year. “They spent a lot of time on our inventory system data. It’s amazing,” says Paula. “And finally, we get to implement using the data.”
In addition to the inventory system, CWRU students are partnering with Storehouse to find and test different biodegradable materials for sachet overwraps (the individual envelopes around tea sachets). This is a key step: Ingredients such as cardamom and ginger have acidic properties that could break down barriers, and conditions in which products are stored after purchase are unknown. If it’s too hot, for example, some materials can break down or even disintegrate, which affects the freshness of the tea.
Building on a Long Relationship with CWRU
But it’s worth the trials and errors as Paula and Dan move to ensure everything they’re doing can be recyclable or biodegradable. With their excellent teas and our flourishing partnership, Storehouse Tea has become a valued vendor for Bon Appétit. Last summer, Lauren hosted a regional meeting for Bon Appétit accounts at CWRU and invited Paula and Dan to come and do a tasting, which exposed Storehouse Tea to other Bon Appétit accounts, spreading awareness of their product. Over time, area accounts began using Storehouse Tea, including the Provenance Café at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Paula and Dan’s personal story connects their family even more deeply to CWRU. Back when it was still Case Institute, Dan’s father graduated with a business degree, and Paula’s uncle was a long-time physics professor and dean there. Because of their ties, Paula and Dan were married on the CWRU campus.
By the time Storehouse Tea moved to its second home in Cleveland, it was five years old. Along with the new location came the need to hire, and Paula made it a mission to find local employees from the company’s diverse neighborhood Storehouse Tea. “We did a lot of events in the community. And being a female owner of a business, it was important to me to hire people that needed help. It was pretty cool,” she says.
That’s why Storehouse Tea chooses to source fresh, organic, Fair Trade tea. High mountain grown and hand-picked leaves are pure and fresh, which in the case of tea means full of flavor. “You generally want to drink a tea leaf within two years of it being picked to get the maximum potency and flavor,” says Dan. “It makes a big difference and you really get that tea flavor,” he says. “It tastes alive.”
All photos courtesy of Storehouse Tea.
