A KITCHEN TABLE.
a grandmother.
A STAINLESS POT.
A RAILROAD APARTMENT.
Mai Chai began in a Queens kitchen, with a battered steel pot, a tin of cardamom from the corner shop, and a recipe scribbled on the back of an envelope from Kolkata.
Our founder, Anjali Bose, had been making chai every morning of her life. What she could not find in New York was the chai she remembered: full-leaf tea that hadn't been pulverized, whole spices that hadn't been irradiated, and a tin that respected both.
So she made it herself. Twenty tins. Then a hundred. Then a waitlist.
CROWN ESTATE FLAVOR. rooted to equity.
Today, Mai Chai works directly with nine tea estates across Assam, Darjeeling, and the Nilgiris. We pay 38% above Fairtrade minimums.
5% of every tin is reinvested in the village schools that educate the children of the pluckers. We've shipped tea from gardens you can pronounce, on land we've walked, sourced from people we've eaten with.
No brokers. No auctions. No anonymous blends.
THE STUDIO.
Every tin is blended by hand, in a 900-square-foot studio on Bond Street. We seal it the day it's filled. We ship it the day after.
No middlemen. No filler. No syrupy "chai concentrate." Just leaf, spice, and the kind of obsession that makes you crush cardamom by hand at 6am because the machine isn't quite right.
NO SHORTCUTS. ever.
- 01Whole leaves, never CTC dust.
- 02Whole spices, crushed within 72 hours of blending.
- 03Direct trade — no brokers, no auctions.
- 04Sealed tins, never plastic pouches.
- 05Shipped within 48 hours of blending.
- 065% of every tin → village schools in the gardens we source from.