Reading a tea label that hides nothing

Pick up any herbal tea sold in Nigeria and turn it over. Most of what you need to judge it is on the back panel, and most of what is wrong with it is on the back panel too. The difference between a blend that tells you everything and one that tells you almost nothing is usually four or five lines of small print.

A label that hides nothing does six things. It names every botanical in the blend. It gives the Latin binomial for each one. It lists them in descending order by weight, so you can tell what you are mostly drinking. It states the net weight and the sachet count, so you can work out the cost per cup. It says where the product was made. And it names the company that imported or manufactured it, with an address you could actually write to.

That last one matters more than people expect. Under NAFDAC rules, no herbal product may be manufactured, imported, advertised, sold or distributed in Nigeria unless it is registered. A label with no importer, no address and no registration number is not a marketing oversight. It is a product that has skipped the step where somebody takes responsibility for it.

The three words that mean the opposite

Flavour. When a label says "natural flavour" or "flavouring", the flavour is not coming from the herbs on the list. It is an added ingredient doing work the botanicals could not do on their own. NAFDAC's infusion rules go further: where a flavour is added to give a product a distinctive taste, the product name is supposed to carry the descriptive name of that flavour. A blend calling itself "Hibiscus Tea" while relying on added hibiscus flavouring is telling you something about how much hibiscus is really in the bag.

Blend. "Proprietary blend" sounds like a recipe worth protecting. In practice it is a way of grouping several ingredients under one weight, so the buyer cannot see how little of the expensive herb is present. If a formula is built around one costly root, a proprietary blend lets the manufacturer put a gram of it beside forty grams of filler and print both under a single line.

Extract. "Herbal extract" without a ratio or a solvent tells you nothing. An extract can be a concentrated preparation worth paying for, or it can be a carrier powder with a trace of plant material sprayed on. The number that makes the word useful, something like 10:1, is exactly the number that tends to be missing.

A label is not marketing. It is the one part of the package the seller is accountable for.

What a picture is allowed to promise

NAFDAC permits pictures of a herb or fruit on the pack, but only where that herb or fruit is properly declared in the ingredient list. This is worth checking, because the front of a pack is where the gap usually shows. Ginger on the front, no ginger in the list, and a line about natural flavour at the bottom is a complete story if you read it in that order.

Work out the cost per cup, not the cost per pack

Two pouches at the same price are rarely the same value. A 75g pouch of fifteen 5g sachets and a 50g pouch of twenty 2.5g sachets are different products sold at the same shelf price. Divide the price by the sachet count and you get the number that actually matters, then check the grams per sachet to see whether a cup is a full serving or a thin one.

Sachet weight also tells you something about form. A 5g pyramid bag holds broken root, berry and leaf with room to open. A 2g flat bag usually holds dust, because dust is what fits.

The dates, and what they are dates for

Two dates should be on the pack and they answer different questions. The batch or lot number tells you which production run you are holding, which is the only thing that makes a recall or a complaint traceable. The expiry or best before date tells you how long the manufacturer will stand behind it.

A pack with an expiry and no batch number is a pack nobody can trace. If something turns out to be wrong with a run, there is no way to identify which run, which means there is no way to withdraw it. Our own pouches carry a twelve month shelf life and the storage condition that shelf life assumes, which is cool and dry and out of sun. A shelf life quoted without storage conditions is half a sentence.

Check the net weight against the sachet count too. Fifteen sachets at 5g is 75g and the pack should say so. Where those numbers do not multiply out, one of them is doing marketing rather than measurement.

What we put on ours

Our tea pouches name six herbs, each with its Latin binomial, and say plainly that the formula is blended in China and imported, stored and distributed from Abuja. We would rather write that than imply a Nigerian blend we did not make. The produce side of the business is where our own sourcing story lives, and it does not need help from the tea labels.

We also say what the tea is not for. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, anyone under 18, and anyone on hormone therapy without clearing it with a doctor first. A label that only lists benefits is not finished.

If you take one habit from this, make it the ingredient list read backwards. Start at the last line, which is where the flavourings, anti-caking agents and fillers sit, and work up. The bottom of the list is where a blend tells the truth about itself.