Meet DAVIDsTEA’s Director Of Tea Sustainability, Nadia De La Vega

On a typical work day, Nadia de la Vega makes herself a cup of orange pekoe tea (her go-to), has meetings with several different teams across the DAVIDsTEA brand (from marketing to training to purchasing) and runs company-wide tea tastings to ensure that everyone—even the people in finance—has the tools and palate to be able to enjoy tea and talk about it. “No matter what your job is at DAVIDsTEA, we see everyone as brand ambassadors, spreading tea love through their respective communities,” Nadia said.

Nadia is a tea connoisseur and DAVIDsTEA’s Director of Tea Sustainability and Content. She’s been with the company since 2012, starting in regulatory before moving on to tea information, marketing, tea content, training and finally sustainability. Her love for tea started at a young age, growing up in Mexico. “In Mexico, people don’t normally drink a lot of tea but in Chile they do,” Nadia said. “My mom is from Chile so I grew up drinking loose leaf tea, and whenever my grandma would come visit she would make a very specific cup of tea for me, so I always had a nice association with tea.” She got a chemistry degree at McGill University and worked in an analytical lab before realizing the lab wasn’t the place for her. She then pursued wine studies and worked in the restaurant industry before finding DAVIDsTEA. Here, Nadia gets to utilize her scientific background to ensure product copy authentically represents the ingredients inside teas, and her love for tasting and creating flavors to make unique tea blends.

As far as sustainability goes, Nadia emphasizes the fact that at DAVIDsTEA this means more than plastic-free and biodegradable sachets and recyclable packaging (which they already offer) and increasing their compostable offerings. Their sustainability ethos, which they refer to as “positivitea,” means that they “keep what’s right for both our local communities and our global partners top of mind, always.”

Fostering healthy ecosystems from a social standpoint is another key piece to the sustainability puzzle. To that end, the company works to ensure the tea workers and farmers they source ingredients from have safe, fair and equal working conditions and use eco-friendly farming practices. 60 percent of DAVIDsTEA’s current collection contributes to the Ethical Tea Partnership (an organization working to achieve a “thriving, socially just and environmentally sustainable tea sector”), and in November 2020 they launched the DAVIDsTEA Impact Fund. “What I love about Ethical Tea Partnership is that they have regional teams that live in the producing countries, and they are the ones that, together with the tea growing communities, identify the needs of that specific place and the types of projects that would best serve them,” Nadia said. “When we get a packaged product so many of us forget that it’s actual people that are harvesting it, living on less than the minimum wage we have in North America, without access to water or electricity, and oftentimes traveling a long way to get to work.”

Two long-term social projects that have benefitted from the DAVIDsTEA Impact Fund are the Nepal Water Project (providing clean drinking water to government schools in Nepal) and the C.A.M.P by DAVIDsTEA x Ethical Tea Partnership, which provides safe education spaces for children that have parents who migrate to other regions during the summer for work. Both of these projects benefit tea-growing gardens that DAVIDsTEA sources from. Nadia’s favorite part of her job is working on these projects and seeing their positive impacts. She noted that many of these projects are years in the works before they’re implemented, which makes it even more rewarding. Of course, expanding her palate and drinking tea all day isn’t so bad, either.