OMGTea: “How Mum’s Cancer Led Me To Found A £1M Tea Business”

Tell us about OMGTea

OMGTea is a Brighton-based company which sells organic matcha online and in stores including Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Ocado, and Holland & Barrett.

It’s built from a passion. I’ve spent much of the past 14 years researching matcha and its cultivation, as well as the Japanese tea ceremony.

It hasn’t always been easy. I was featured on Dragon’s Den in 2018 but failed to gain investment. I was also on BBC Food: Truth or Scare as a green tea expert in 2019.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

One day in 2009 my mum was undergoing surgery for breast cancer and I was trying to distract myself from the stressful situation, so I made a call to a business contact.

I was an event manager working on The Northwest Football Awards. I put in a call to Maurice Watkins, who chaired the judging panel.

On the call, he happened to tell me that he was also chairing a £5m charity appeal for Breakthrough Breast Cancer, now known as Breast Cancer Now. I got goosebumps as it seemed so coincidental.

Within a few months, I had taken a job at Breakthrough Breast Cancer and was running the charity appeal. It was then that I met the appeal’s research director, Professor Michael Lisanti.

Lisanti’s research suggested that certain antioxidants and amino acids found in matcha tea could potentially reduce the growth of cancer stem cells. So, thinking this might help my mum, I began to source the best matcha I could find.

I sourced a high grade matcha direct from Japan and the quality was fantastic. It made me and my mum feel great. It gave us a sense of control by doing something positive that might help. We got a mental and physical boost of energy and we both continue to drink matcha every day.

After a few name changes, I settled on OMGTea and launched in 2014. Organic Matcha Green Tea – OMG! It was just another coincidence. I loved the name and it seemed to fit so perfectly.

The lettering in our logo represents the delicate lines on the granite stone mill, which is used by authentic matcha producers in Japan to grind the tea leaves into a fine powder.

We launched on Amazon in early 2015 and went to food festivals and farmers markets to make those early sales.

Our first listings were at Planet Organic and other independent retailers in Brighton and Hove, where OMGTea is based. Sales were slow at first, but the feedback was always good.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

Sales of OMGTea more than doubled last year and the business is set to turnover £1m this financial year.

OMGTea boasts Great Taste awards across the entire range and in 2022, the  AAA+ Grade Organic Matcha was awarded the highly coveted 3-Star Great Taste Award.

Then, in late 2023, we gained investment from Aiya, the first time the global Japanese tea company has invested in another brand in its 136 year history.

What can we hope to see from OMGTea in the future?

The investment from Aiya is enabling us to grow OMGTea into a bigger brand which will help to support even more people adopt a healthier lifestyle.

Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world, and I think there is a lot we can learn about healthier living from them. For starters, if everyone drank a cup of matcha a day, I genuinely believe the world would be a better place.