The Sullivan Origin Story
Thomas Sullivan operated a tea and coffee importing business in New York. His standard practice was sending potential clients small tin sample canisters of his teas. Around 1908, seeking a cheaper sample format, Sullivan began hand-sewing small silk pouches to send as samples. The expectation was that clients would open the pouch and use its contents conventionally. Instead, his clients — whether through laziness, curiosity, or pragmatic efficiency — dropped the silk pouch directly into their teacup or teapot and brewed through the mesh fabric.
The result was an effective if rough cup of tea, and clients began requesting more of "those little bags." Sullivan, instantly recognising the opportunity, developed gauze bags (silk being too fine and expensive for commercial scale) and marketed the format actively. By 1910, tea bags were appearing in commercial trade catalogues.
The Format's Commercial Expansion
Tea bag adoption was initially slow outside North America. Britain — where loose leaf tea was deeply culturally embedded — resisted the format well into the mid-20th century. The first British patent for a tea bag was filed in 1903 by A.V. Smith; commercial production began properly in the 1930s; but mass adoption only occurred from the 1960s onwards as Tetley and Typhoo invested in tea bag marketing and supermarket distribution.
🧠 Expert Tip: What Tea Bags Contain
The leaf used in most commercial tea bags is CTC (Cut-Tear-Curl) grade — the smallest, most uniformly processed black tea grade that maximises surface area and brewing speed in a confined space. This is qualitatively different from the orthodox loose-leaf grades used in specialty tea. The CTC format sacrifices much of the aromatic complexity of whole-leaf tea for the convenience and extraction speed that the bag format enables.
The Environmental Problem
Standard tea bag sealing uses polypropylene — a thermoplastic that heat-seals the bag but is not biodegradable. A standard tea bag composted in a garden or food waste bin will decompose everywhere except the polypropylene seal, which remains as a microplastic fragment. UK consumers use approximately 61 billion tea bags per year, making the microplastic residue from tea bags a measurable environmental concern. Biodegradable alternatives using plant-based PLA (polylactic acid) or cotton mesh are growing, but represent a small fraction of the market.
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