Teabags were invented accidentally in 1908 by a New York tea trader, Thomas Sullivan.

Sullivan packed loose leaf teas in small silken bags and customers thought they can be used as an alternative to metal infusers. When Sullivan’s customers wrote back to him, he improvised on the silken bag, and soon America was brewing tea from rectangular bags.

The ubiquitous invention, however, crossed the Atlantic only in the 1950s when a leading tea manufacturer, Tetley started mass-producing tea bags. It is believed that the two world wars causing material shortages and scorn for this method of brewing loose-leaf tea were the main reasons why it took such a long time to be popular across the world. 

Somehow the belief that for tea to taste its best, the leaves ought to be removed from the hot water at the end of a specific brewing period popularized tea bags across the world. However, due to the fragile nature of the tea bags, good-quality loose-leaf tea could not enter this segment. In 1997, Brooke Bond, now owned by Unilever, invented pyramid-shaped tea bags. 

This invention brought about a transformation. Using pyramid-shaped tea bags, larger leaves have the ability to unfurl properly. This means that when steeping the tea, the water can flow through the leaves and extract more flavor. In 2014, the UK-based Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled in its favor after rivals accused Unilever of exaggerating the claims of pyramid-shaped tea bags. ASA said in its ruling that pyramid-shaped bags indeed have a better brewing efficiency. 

At TeaOrb, we believe in delivering quality with accurate quantity. This is the reason we have chosen to use pyramid tea bags so that you get the freshness of loose-leaf tea from our farms to your cup.