NEMI is a London-based tea company offering a variety of whole leaf tea blends – both loose tea and in biodegradable tea pyramids – along with a chai syrup.
We are strong believers in creating positive change through business, and provide employment to refugees to help them better integrate in the UK.
We employ refugees to run tea stalls across London food markets, festivals, events and conferences, which allows them to boost their English skills, regain confidence, and work on skills required to enter the UK job market.
Being raised in India, tea (chai) is the ultimate hot drink and enjoyed by all each day. It is rooted in community, family and hospitality. It’s the drink to wake you up in the morning and also the perfect digestion aid after dinner.
Chai can be found on every corner in India and no matter who you are, you’re welcome to enjoy a cup.
We source our tea from educated and experienced farmers in the Assam region of India, who in return are honoured for their hard work through fair-trade initiatives.
By buying tea on fair-trade terms, farmers and workers benefit in many ways; from better working conditions through to training in how to improve the way they farm and manage their environment, to the opportunity to improve healthcare and education in their community.
This is something we strongly believe in supporting through our business.
Not only this, our tea pyramids are made from soilon and are biodegradable on an industrial level. The string and labels are both attached using ultrasound rather than glue and all the tea is packaged in natureflex, which is industrially compostable.
This brings our impact full circle by giving thought to how we source, package and sell our teas.
As a social enterprise, a fundamental aspect of NEMI’s business model is to empower refugees, by offering them employment opportunities rarely accessible to them in the UK job market.
NEMI hopes to give a large number of refugees the chance to develop new skills, integrate into society and, ultimately, provide for themselves and their families.
We also want to create employment opportunities that go beyond making tea.
By becoming a large-scale commercial business, we can hire refugees for their commercial skills, not just for entry-level work. For example, we had a journalist from Sudan with 25 years’ experience working for us.
As well as making tea, he’s helped out with blog posts and marketing, and managed to get a short-term contract from an Arabic newspaper off the back of it.
The more we grow, the more we can offer these kinds of opportunities.
We’re currently growing our list of places where you can taste and buy NEMI and hope to do so across London, the UK, Europe and globally.
To deepen our impact even more, we want to have franchises of NEMI cafes across London that are solely run and owned by refugees.
Our vision doesn’t stop there either, we want to be the first BCorp in the world that sells tea and empowers refugees.
We’re seeing more and more people abandoning the larger governing forces and taking action themselves – you can play your part by enjoying a cuppa with us and supporting real change.
