Posted on the Asheville Citizen-Times website on November 8, 2024
Asheville — Jessie Dean, of West Asheville, has dreamed of owning a tea company, procuring ingredients directly from small farmers to redefine how tea is sourced and enjoyed.
Asheville Tea Company was a long-time incubation tenant and client with the Small Business Center at A-B Tech Enka. They had just recently moved out and into their own new facility.
In 2016, she founded Asheville Tea Company, developed in an incubator program at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, which grew into an 11-person production with a regional retail store and nationwide online distribution in eight years.
“Our mission has always been to do our part in creating value chains here in the Southeast rather than relying on traditional supply chains,” said Jessie Dean, who’s also the company’s chief executive officer. “We believe that makes a delicious, fresh, potent cup of tea and supports our area’s economy and conservation of farmland and regenerative agricultural practices.”
For nearly a year, Asheville Tea Company occupied a building at 91 Thompson St. near the historic Biltmore Village for its production, distribution, and headquarters. She planned to convert a section into a retail space for customers.
On the weekend of Sept. 27, Jessie Dean and her sister, Melissa Dean, who’s the director of sales and marketing, watched those dreams and years of hard work get swept away by the Swannanoa River during Tropical Storm Helene.
Jessie Dean, founder of Asheville Tea Company, stands among the ruins of her production facility and office along the Swannanoa River in Asheville, on October 31, 2024.
The nearly 6,000-square-foot building, made primarily of wood, was lifted off its foundation and carried away as the river rose more than 24 feet high.
“I took almost nothing out of the building,” Melissa Dean said while touring the wreckage along Thompson Street on Oct. 31. “We were watching all of the weather reports, all the gauge predictions. We moved everything up high thinking just in case water gets into the building, but the building had been lifted out of the flood zone years ago.”
The sisters said they watched a video a resident of a nearby apartment complex recorded the moment the building washed away and split in half on a utility pole.
Since then, Jessie and Melissa Dean have slowly tracked what happened, identifying building material, office furniture, light fixtures, production equipment, packaged boxes of tea, and silver bags of ingredients scattered on the debris-covered Thompson Street and riverbank.
“The first sign that I saw even before that was a white wicker desk that we had in our office that is kind of sandwiched between flooring and roofing,” Jessie Dean said.
The bulk of the wreckage is embedded in the front of Asaka Japanese Cuisine’s building and parking lot with more found crashed against Long John Silver’s on Biltmore Avenue.
“We’re finding things as we go,” Jessie Dean said. “We’re finding things like 25 feet up into trees just strewn about on both sides of the river all the way down.”
What's left of Asheville Tea Company's products
Jessie Dean estimated losses from their raw materials and equipment at nearly half a million dollars.
The company distributes wholesale to regional retailers and ships to customers online nationwide. The tea products on the shelves are what’s left of the original inventory at places including French Broad Food Co-Op in Asheville, Swamp Rabbit Café and Grocery in Greenville, and Ingles and Mast General Stores across the Southeast.
In May, Asheville Tea Company expanded the distribution of select hot and cold brews to Whole Foods Market. A list of retailers is on the business’s website, Asheville Tea Company.
“You can find our tea, which is nice. I keep seeing it around town and it’s like seeing old friends,” Jessie Dean said.
Melissa Dean, who also sustained flood damage to her Woodfin home and lost her vehicle in the storm, said the company usually inches along through the year, depending on the fourth quarter sales increase during the cold weather months.
“This is the time that’s make-or-break for us,” she said. “We are so seasonally driven by the holidays and it’s the time when people think about tea in particular so it’s been a huge revenue hit."
Asheville Tea Company’s relaunch
An Asheville Tea Company relaunch was underway several weeks after the devastating storm, though Jessie Dean said it hadn’t been easy to restart, especially when navigating the sadness and shock of Tropical Storm Helene.
She said residents, customers, residents, farms, and other tea companies in Asheville, Pennsylvania, and Canada have shown an outpouring of support, offering production and retail space, ingredients, supplies, and co-manufacturing opportunities.
She said partner farms still had harvests of herbs and florals on reserve for the company, including lime basil, lemon basil, chrysanthemum, lavender, chamomile, peppermint, spearmint and native varietal mountain mint.
Other suppliers had items, like branded boxes, ordered by the company.
Jessie Dean said a crowdsourcing fundraiser and Mountain BizWorks relief fund loan have assisted with reestablishing the small business. However, the company must pay debt from inventory and equipment that’s now lost.
She projected the first batches of the new inventory would be ready for sale by the holiday season though on a much smaller scale with only a few staple and holiday tea blends available on the website and at retail shops.
She said staff members will be brought back as operations ramp up.
“It will be exciting to have something back out in the world,” Jessie Dean said.
Food and beverage small businesses’ future in Asheville and WNC
Jessie Dean said she and her sister grew up in Western North Carolina, and launching the business in Asheville was in part because of the incredible community of supportive food and beverage entrepreneurs doing purpose-driven work and creating a vibrant culture for locals and visitors.
The tea company dubbed itself “the other craft brew” as a nod to Asheville’s craft beer, a leading industry.
“It was compelling for me to start a business here because we could be a part of that ― the buzz and excitement around doing good work and creating great experiences,” she said.
Jessie Dean said she has hope and faith the company and WNC community can rebuild and revive the culture in the next few years though there’s fear over the lack of funding needed to accomplish the feat. She called for more grants ― not loans ― for local business owners.
“I believe this whole community is an ecosystem and without it, we’re not the same,” Jessie Dean said. “It feels vital to support each other in the process of rebuilding and that’s what Western North Carolina people do and have always done.”
For more, visit Asheville Tea Company and follow @ashevilleteaco on Instagram.