My name is Jasmijn Bloemert and I founded DrinkBlad from a simple, but persistent frustration: why is it so hard to find honest, pure, whole leaf tea in the Netherlands? You can accept such a frustration, or you can take action. I chose the latter.

On a flight from China in the spring of 2005, I was fascinated by what a Chinese passenger was drinking. Noticing my curious gaze, he handed me a handful of leaves and gestured for me to put them in hot water. What I tasted changed everything: the tea was fresh, subtle, smooth, and pure. The passenger turned out to be a tea farmer and had brought tea from his own tea garden. This was something completely different from anything I had ever experienced—even after living in Japan, a country famous for its green tea, for a year.

Loose leaf tea was already available in the Netherlands twenty years ago, but the quality didn’t come close to what I had tasted on that plane. When I visited a commercial tea plantation in Rwanda in 2010, I discovered why. I saw how tea plants were shaved and how tea dust ended up in bags. During a tea tasting, I tasted tea from whole leaves, broken leaves and tea dust. The differences were astonishing. But even the whole leaf didn’t compare to the experience on the plane—I later discovered that this was due to the use of chemical pesticides (necessary on low-lying plantations with warm climates) and the terroir.

Fast forward to last year, and I finally found a tea that took me back to that one experience from 2005. The taste was pure, the tea clean, and the leaves whole. Just the way it was meant to be.

The enthusiastic reactions of everyone I let taste this tea gave me the final push: in January 2025 I founded DrinkBlad. My mission? Let everyone in the Netherlands discover how tea should really taste. Pure, transparent and without compromise.

With tea - greetings

Jasmine Bloemert