This BBSRC Business and Academia Prosperity Partnership (2023-2028) between Lipton Teas and Infusions and Â鶹´«Ã½AV seeks to develop a regenerative tea production system.
  • Dates15 November 2023 to 14 November 2028
  • SponsorBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Lipton Teas and Infusions
  • Funded£1,513k (BBSRC)
  • PartnersLipton Teas and Infusions
    UK Tea and Infusions Association

Lipton Teas and Infusions is one of the world’s largest providers of tea with tea plantations in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda. This partnership’s ambition is to use digital and genetic technologies to develop a regenerative tea production system with better climate resilience and with lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We aim to develop drone imagery and analysis for tea canopies (work-package 1), and use it to enhance the use of digital agriculture for improved crop management (work-package 2), and clone selection and high-throughput canopy phenotyping for transpiration and N status (work-package 3).

Impact and findings

The partnership builds on long-term research carried out by Â鶹´«Ã½AV with Unilever (now Lipton) tea estates in East Africa since the 1980s. During the last ten years, we have developed a digital platform for tea crop management called “Internet of TeaTM” or “IoTeaTM” that incorporates a model of tea growth and development called “CUPPA-Tea”. We are now working together to understand the fundamental processes in the soil that influence greenhouse gas emissions, and using advanced genomic technologies to accelerate the tea breeding process.