Our Story

The fluorescent lights buzzed. The meeting had turned, again, to making tea cheaper.

Drop to a lower grade of the botanical. Add artificial flavouring and sweetener to cover what goes missing.

“The focus group report is back. They don’t notice the difference.”

But I did.

I was an executive at one of Canada’s largest coffee and tea brands, and I watched it happen in front of me, one quarter at a time. Blends sold as wellness that were already months old by the time the box was opened. Lifeless dust in plastic sachets, leaching microplastics and bleach into every healthy cup.

I never told my boss what I actually thought. I wanted to keep my job.

I told myself that was the reasonable thing to do. It ate at me anyway.

Then that winter I got the flu, and what I wanted was my grandmother’s remedy, the one written in her Ayurvedic recipe book. I tried every box on the grocery store shelf. Not one helped. Not one had even tried.

Wrapped in a blanket, throat burning, I said it out loud to an empty kitchen: “Enough.”

I stopped answering my Zoom calls. I had spent my whole career looking at screens, and now I was in Indian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European grocery stores, hunting down specialty ingredients, then blending them with my hands. I was no professional tea blender.

Turmeric stained the countertops gold.
Steam fogged the windows.
The whole house smelled of cardamom, chamomile, and stubborn hope.

Nupur, my wife, blended beside me and told me the truth about every batch. Most of them were not good. That is harder to hear from the person you married than from anyone else, and it is the only reason the good ones are good. Nothing goes into a pouch today until she has tasted it and said yes.

1 year. Over 170 blends tasted. Only 9 made it.

Those 9 became EQ State. We didn’t start it to sell tea. We started it to give tea back its soul.

People ask whether it got easier after that first year. It didn’t, because we never stopped being obsessed. We collect tea the way other people collect wine. We read tea blending books on holiday. We argue about which pouch keeps the tea fresh the longest.

Since then, 308,765 cups steeped.

We are still in Oakville. The batches are still small. Nupur still tells me the truth.

Every tea we sell is the thing I should have said in that room.

Yash, Co-founder of EQ State Tea