Straight from nature, they sublimate and enliven our organic teas. On top of that, we've always liked to play with them to offer you ever more daring mixtures. Go digging into all the delicious ranges because improbable combinations sometimes give birth to the greatest truths.
Natural flavours represent our Kusmi Touch and are an integral part of our know-how. They're the basis of our contract with nature which requires that we only use teas and plants from organic farming and that, when we decide to add a particular taste, we only do so using 100% natural ingredients. What if we just showed you behind the scenes of the birth of these natural ingredients which give this unique taste to our blends?
Flavouring certain organic teas: quite a story. And yet, what could be more natural.
What is the Kusmi touch? Natural flavour! Far from being a naughty word, "flavour" invites us to explore endless possibilities in terms of mixtures and that's why today,
we're taking you straight to the source of flavour: nature. A breathtaking view of Mount Etna, a gentle sun, the smell of citrus fruits floating in the air...
here we are in the land of citrus. Specifically, in Sicily where lemon is king, and in Calabria in southern Italy, the only region in the world where bergamot is produced.
Most people don't know exactly what it is. And yet they're all familiar with Earl Grey tea. What if we told you that bergamot is the citrus fruit which gave us the beloved Earl Gray in the first place?
"When you scratch bergamot, you smell Earl Gray tea. I think that we don't make enough of the link between the fruit and the aromatic note which comes out of it" Sylvain
In France, you can't really find bergamot on our market stalls. And not for nothing is this little-known citrus fruit the treasure of Calabria. Resembling a lemon with its yellow colour and with the shape of a slightly deformed orange, bergamot isn't eaten as a normal fruit. It's produced and used for its incredible scent or its juice. At Kusmi, it flavours most of our Earl Greys: organic Earl Grey, Anastasia, Saint Petersburg…
Mixing, assembling, decompartmentalising without barriers or a priori, drawing the richness of our blends from the diversity of the natural world: that's Kusmi! So inevitably, nature and its flavours have a special place in our blends. They can enliven all our teas, giving them an incomparable taste and unexpected flavours.
At Kusmi we've chosen, where possible, to flavour our teas with essential oils, odorous substances which are produced by certain plants or fruits and which can be extracted in liquid form. Recognised for their natural origin, essential oils are often used in alternative medicine, but are also used to give the finest foods the taste of the fruit from which they're extracted. In nature, the essential oil is found in the bark of the fruit.
Our trip to Italy, to our essential oil supplier, allowed us to see with our own eyes how an essential oil is produced.
In our quest to find the best supplier of essential oils, 25 years ago we crossed paths with the family business Simone Gatto, founded in 1926. Today Simone Gatto is a leader in the production of 100% pure and natural essential oils of high quality derived from fruits grown in Sicily and Calabria, where the best citrus groves in Italy can be found.