GAME CHANGERS
Two Colorado companies, two ingredients a world away, one singular mission
Written by Amanda M. Faison for EDIBLE DENVER BOULDER FORT COLLINS MAGAZINE
This is the story of two crops—vanilla and tea—both grown on the other side of the world. This is the story of two Colorado companies—The Sweetest Bean and Teatulia—founded largely by accident. This is the story of how you change the world and why it’s important to know the origin of the foods you eat.
In 2005, Shana Gilbert, a Colorado-based filmmaker, chased a movie idea to Africa. She wanted to film and tell the story of humanitarian disaster. Instead, on the way to Zimbabwe, she and her crew stopped in Uganda, where they stumbled upon a pack of orphaned and abandoned street kids—65 in total—raising each other. They stole her heart and, even after Gilbert returned to the States, she couldn’t shake the encounter. Within a couple of months she returned, moving in with the children, determined to get them nourished, educated and out of poverty. She stayed for seven years.
In order to do all the above, Gilbert embarked on creating businesses that could not only teach the kids skills but also could provide lasting income. “We did everything—taxis, chickens, piggery,” she says. “Each business was supposed to maintain something.” Within a matter of years, they had built a farm and a network of enterprises—one of which, eventually, was vanilla.
At about the same time, in 2006, Linda Appel Lipsius and her husband, Adam Lipsius, met Kazi Anis Ahmed, a Bangladeshi with an organic tea garden and a dream. As Linda tells it in an interview many years later, Ahmed was looking to export the organic teas to the U.S. and she offered to help with market analysis. It wasn’t until she began to dig into the logistics of the garden that her involvement grew into a real partnership. Teatulia (teatulia.com) was created.
Located in Northern Bangladesh, Ahmed had planted the garden as a means of boosting the local economy and restoring the land to a more natural state. The area had been ravaged by rock pickers—an industry where people pull large stones from the land and sell them to companies that make building materials like concrete. Uprooting the rocks, however, dislodges nutrients and the soil’s natural order and the land turns barren and desert-like.
Ahmed, however, was able to see beyond the desolation and visualize a tea garden that could (and would!) grow without pesticides, the use of machinery or the implementation of unnatural irrigation. By the time he met Linda Lipsius, the organic garden was thriving.
Teatulia, which is named for the region in Bangladesh where the garden is located, was a true garden-to-cup company. And the timing couldn’t have been better for finding a market in the U.S. The farm-to-table movement had become mainstream and global tea companies were preaching the message. This is when it really clicked for Lipsius and Ahmed: They were ahead of the curve because they already had a product that had a story, was marketable and was something consumers could feel good about. Today, they have 10 full-time Colorado-based employees and package everything in the U.S.
Back in Africa, Gilbert was toiling in vanilla. While living in Indonesia for five years, she became familiar with the ins and outs of the vanilla industry. She also became familiar with the industry’s corruption. Vanilla, which takes nine months to grow, is a time- and labor-intensive crop that can only be pollinated by hand.
“[The orchids] open one time, for one hour, then they shrivel up and die,” Gilbert explains. “When an orchid opens, it has to be pollinated right away. It only grows along the equator, [coincidentally] in impoverished nations where people will work for nothing.”
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