About Us
Blends For Friends is not your normal tea supplier.
Blends For Friends was founded in 2006 by Alex Probyn, our Master Tea Blender, in order to provide the world with highly personalised and custom-made tea blends to give as a truly unique tea gift for tea lovers. This bespoke and custom-made tea ethos still remains today, although what we’re able to do now is significantly more impressive…
Alex joined the tea industry in the late 1990s as a trainee tea taster for Tetley and after five years of intensive training was considered a master tea blender. Although Tetley provided Alex with world-class tea training and plenty of opportunity to work in the countries of origin, the types of tea he was able to blend were limited to more commercial, large scale options and this was frustrating to Alex as he knew there was a whole world of tea that most people were completely unaware of. This was enough to prompt Alex to set up Blends For Friends.
Back in 2006 the entire business was run from a specially designated room in Alex’s house and the entire business was based around creating bespoke tea blends to give as highly personalised tea gifts for individuals. It soon became clear that the world had a rapidly growing thirst for high-quality, custom blended teas and Blends For Friends was able to scale-up the operation to provide private label tea blending and packing services for an ever-widening array of customers of various sizes all over the world.
Today the business consists of 30 people in purpose built facilities of 25,000 square feet. We source and blend teas, herbs and spices from all over the world, manufacture pyramid tea bags and single-serve matcha sticks and also pack into many formats of retail carton, jar or pouch. We offer a totally unique service for all our customers with bespoke tea support in providing the best quality product that is most appropriate to their needs.
True to our original word, no matter how small or large our customers are, every single blend we create can still be totally bespoke and we will never knowingly recreate the same blend twice – since 2006 we have created in excess of 25,000 unique recipes of tea and this increases every single day.
Whoever you are, if you’re looking for a totally bespoke tea blend we can definitely help you and we would be delighted to do so…