Custom tea packaging.

The numbers.

Formats for loose leaf and bagged.

Tin-tie is the format the category expects — fold, press, done, and it reads as craft. Side-gusset and quad-seal hold more volume per unit of film and stack squarely in a carton. Stand-up pouches sell on a shelf; single-serve sachets are how a new blend gets tried.

Barrier, kraft, and the compostable question.

Kraft-and-foil hybrids give the craft look with a real barrier behind it — the paper is the outer ply, not the barrier. A clear window sells the leaf but every window is a weak point for light; keep it small on a delicate green or white tea. Compostable film is genuinely available and genuinely shortens shelf life. Both things are true and you should choose deliberately.

Sets, caddies and multi-packs.

Tea sells hard at gifting, and gifting is a structural problem: several small units presented as one. Rigid trays with compartments, sleeves over plain caddies, and multi-pack carriers all do it without a custom mould.

How to spec tea packaging.

Loose leaf is the awkward case: it is bulky and light, so the pouch is sized by volume rather than by weight. A 50 g whole-leaf white tea can need the same pouch as 200 g of a fine broken grade. Send the bulk density or, easier, send the product and we will size it against the real thing.

Decide the barrier from the shelf life you are promising, not from the look you want. Metalized film holds aroma longest. A kraft-and-foil hybrid gets you the craft aesthetic with the foil doing the actual work behind the paper. All-paper looks best and protects least.

Match the closure to how the product is used. A tin-tie suits a customer who decants into a caddy; a zipper suits one who dips into the bag daily for months. If the pack is a single-serve sachet, none of this applies and you are specifying a fin seal instead.

If you are launching a range, specify one pouch size across blends wherever possible and differentiate on print. It keeps the tooling count down and lets you add a blend without a new structural spec.

What goes wrong.

Windows on delicate teas. Green, white and yellow teas degrade fastest under light. A generous window looks beautiful on day one and costs you the aroma by month three. Photograph the leaf instead.

Treating the tin-tie as a seal. A tin-tie closes a bag neatly. It does not make it airtight. For any meaningful shelf life it needs a barrier film behind it and ideally a proper seal under the fold.

Compostable film without a shelf-life conversation. Compostable and biodegradable films are real and available, and they carry a lower barrier than metalized film. That is a legitimate trade-off to make deliberately — it is a bad one to discover after a season of returns.

Aroma transfer between blends. Strongly scented blends stored next to delicate ones will cross-contaminate through insufficient barrier. If you warehouse a chai next to a silver needle, the barrier spec on both just became more important.

What moves the price.

Film structure is the main driver. A single-layer kraft bag is the cheap end; a metalized laminate with a kraft outer ply is a multi-layer construction and costs more, and it is what actually protects aroma. Paying for the look without the barrier is the most common false economy in this category.

Closures add real cost. A tin-tie is an applied component; a press-to-close zipper is another; a slider zipper is more again. On a low-priced blend the closure can be a visible share of the packaging cost.

Windows, matte finishes and inside-printing each add a pass. A matte soft-touch pouch with a die-cut window and foil detailing is a genuinely premium object and prices like one — which is fine at a premium price point and painful at a supermarket one.

Volume moves all of it. The jump from 1,000 to 5,000 units is the single largest percentage drop you will see, because the fixed setup is spread across five times the run. Quotes here are all-in — tooling, printing, finishing and packing in one number — and reorders carry no setup fee, so the second run of the same artwork is always cheaper than the first.

Every printing & finish option.

Every decoration below runs on pouches, caddies and gift cartons. Pantone spot matching is standard, not an upcharge tier, and artwork files stay on record for 24 months so a reorder is a single email.

From sample to shelf.

Send the fill weight and whether it is loose leaf, bagged or single-serve. Loose leaf is bulky and light, which makes the pouch bigger than the weight suggests.

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