Pekoe takes its name from the Chinese term báiháo (白毫), the fine white down on young tea leaves that marks an especially delicate harvest and exceptional quality.
The word later travelled through the language of tea, and we chose Pekoe because it captures the precision, tenderness, and clarity we expect from every lot we source for Switzerland.
Sri Lanka — known to the world as Ceylon during the golden age of tea — sits between 6° and 10° north of the equator, where the convergence of monsoon winds, high rainfall, and extraordinary altitude creates conditions found nowhere else on earth.
The steep mountain gardens of Nuwara Eliya, Dimbula, Uva, and Uda Pussellawa — all above 1,800m — yield leaves of exceptional brightness and clarity. White teas emerge honey-sweet and floral; black teas arrive with a bright, citrus-edged character that has made Ceylon famous since the 1870s; green teas grown here carry a clean, mineral freshness unrivalled in other origins.
We chose Ceylon because it is, simply, one of the most traceable and characterful tea origins in the world. Every estate has its own microclimate, its own harvest timing, its own fingerprint in the cup.
Pekoe was built on a refusal to compromise. Most tea sold in Europe passes through three or four intermediary hands before reaching the consumer — blended, standardised, and stripped of the qualities that make a great single-estate tea remarkable.
We work directly with twelve certified organic partner gardens across four distinct tea regions of Sri Lanka — Nuwara Eliya, Dimbula, Uva, and Uda Pussellawa. We visit estates, meet the gardeners and factory managers, and agree on purchase terms that reflect a fair return for exceptional work. No auction floors. No commodity blending. Every lot we bring to Switzerland is purchased with a specific destination in mind.
Each shipment undergoes independent quality assessment in Colombo before export, and again upon arrival in Switzerland — ensuring that what you receive is exactly what we selected at origin.
From garden to dispatch, every lot is traceable to a specific estate, elevation, and harvest season.
We select only teas that pass our three-stage evaluation: sensory assessment at the garden, independent lab testing in Colombo, and a final tasting in Zürich. If a batch does not meet the standard, it does not travel.
Single-origin is not a marketing label for us — it is a commitment. Every product carries the name of the estate and the harvest region. We never blend across origins, and we never obscure provenance.
We pay above-market rates to our partner gardens and require adherence to environmental and labour standards as a condition of partnership. Our packaging uses recycled and recyclable materials, and we offset the carbon footprint of each shipment.
We publish the origin, elevation, and harvest season of every product we sell. If you want to know which hillside your tea came from, we can tell you. That level of transparency is rare in the industry — and we think it should be the norm.