What is Premium Kratom Tea?
If you’ve been admiring our newest product labels and were asking yourself, “what do all those new symbols on the side mean?”, then this is the blog for you! In this piece we’ll get into why our labels proudly display these stickers. Of all our values, we choose to highlight our 3rd party lab tested kratom, sustainable farming initiatives, and environmental awareness.
Our Values
In this day and age, it is really hard to tell what is or is not a simple ploy to make more money versus something being motivated by an honest commitment to a set of values.
We are for profit company, but we are vigilant against any impulse that would put profit in front of our top priority — delivering you simple, delicious kratom tea made with the highest quality herbs in the world.
Within this, we don’t take kratom legality for granted, so a huge part of our mission is normalizing kratom by promoting its proper use. And if it’s not already clear, that means using kratom in an herbal tea. As part of our mission to do good, we prioritize sourcing all our herbs (kratom, valerian root, chamomile, etc.) from fair trade farmers and importers.
A 3rd party lab validates the quality of our herbs. Importantly, we use state of the art analytical equipment to distinguish over a dozen different alkaloids.
Our lab tested kratom allows us to not only inform our customers, but also advance the scientific understanding of the plant itself.
As part of our commitment to the global community, Top Tree is committed to using biodegradable shipping material and tea bags with recyclable tea packaging. As we grow, we will continue to research and enact more eco-friendly initiatives.
Premium Crushed Leaf Kratom
What does Premium Crushed Leaf Kratom mean? It means that we pay a premium for our importer to maintain good relationships with their Indonesian contacts. There is an economic bottom line that many kratom vendors fight over.
When vendors insist on paying only a few dollars per kilo of kratom, the farmers are who suffer. They simply cannot support themselves or their families—let alone sustainability initiatives—and because this is the only option for many, it leads to unsafe practices that hurt the end consumer.
As one example, we’ve heard of Indonesian farmers adding non-kratom leaves to their harvest – a practice that would be hard to detect once the leaf is processed and milled. Plus, who knows what the leaf may be! Your swallowing a random leaf concoction. It could be a benign leaf without any effect, or, it could exert toxic effects. Simply put, you don’t know what you’re putting into yourself.
We only offer 100% pure, uncut crushed leaf kratom and we pay our farmers a fair price to support a living wage. Which leads nicely into the next symbol we proudly display on our label…
Supports Sustainable Farming Indonesia
Sustainable is a broad term that necessarily intersects many different fields and definitions. For something to be sustainable, it must be rooted in a holistic picture.
Paying a premium to ensure that our farmers are not incentivized to cut their product is part and parcel to showing respect to them as a human being. As humans they must eat, shelter themselves, clothe themselves, provide for their family, etc., and with all that means they must be paid fairly.
Conveniently, kratom is a fairly sustainable crop. If it weren’t for the distance kratom covers when shipped across the ocean, it would be a carbon negative industry! Do you want kratom to be a more environmentally friendly industry? Simple, plant more kratom! Like hemp, kratom is a great carbon sink.
Paying farmers more allows them to upgrade their operation. This means that more kratom trees are being grown, and taking in more C02. That is what maintaining a holistic worldview entails.
US grown kratom leaf: stay tuned for news about our sustainability grown, US kratom leaf coming soon. Our trees are a little over three years old and are beginning to product the rich alkaloid profiles we want. Follow us on Instagram to see how our newest saplings are coming along!
Biodegradable Tea Bags and Recyclable Packaging
What should you do with your tea bags after you’ve brewed tea with them? Well, how about using them to feed yourself?!
No, don’t literally eat them, that’s why you’re making tea and not tossing and washing nasty micronized powder. I mean to say that you should turn your used tea bags into compost! It’s as easy as getting a 5-gallon bucket at home or reaching out to your local composting program.
Composting is great because it is an easy and positive way of dealing with your waste. Compost is often referred to as “black gold” because of its value as an amazing fertilizer. We only have a finite amount of nutrition in the soil which plants need to grow. Industrial farming requires artificial nitrate rich fertilizer to sustain their production rate.
This utilizes a chemical technique called the Haber-Bosch process. In short, air undergoes high pressure and temperature with a metal catalyst to form ammonium, a popular industrial fertilizer. The Haber-Bosch process alone is responsible for 1-2% of our annual global energy expenditure.
A downstream effect of using ammonium as a synthetic fertilizer is that it causes a spike in denitrifying bacteria, which feed on the free nitrites in the soil. These bacteria are responsible for producing the majority of the nitrous oxide (N20) in our environment. N20 is a greenhouse gas with an impact much larger than that of CO2.
In short, composting allows for the complete circumvention of this synthetic fertilization process. And what makes the earth happy makes Top Tree Herbs happy.
3rd Party Lab Tested Kratom for Purity and Potency
Another important facet of Top Tree’s commitment to doing good is honesty. There is no question about it, we must honestly disclose and vet out the contents of our tea. Our lab tested kratom is screened for heavy metals, bacteria, pesticides and other contaminants.
This is the only way to ensure that we are not serving a potentially dangerous cup of tea. Many labs report being pressured by kratom vendors to falsify certain reports to save them the expense of either cleaning or disposing of a tainted supply. As kratom users, we would only make a tea available if we would drink it ourselves. But because we source our kratom from quality sources, we’ve yet to experience any negative results in the lab.
See The New Product Labels!
These symbols appear on all of our new product labels. Check out our store to see our new inventory! We have morning blends, afternoon blends, and evening blends. We’ve also updated our plain crushed leaf tea bags to 3 grams from 2 grams. On top of that, check out our specialty, limited edition loose leaf blends.
