ALMOST every Jamaican child can attest to starting and ending every day with a ‘piping cuppa tea’, made from local herbs. They will also agree that if they had any ailment, they’d be told, “Just drink a likkle tea!” before a doctor was called.

In 2017 Patrique Goodall decided to take the idea of ‘a likkle tea’ to another level.

“Likkle Tea started in 2017, during a period when I was running myself very thin, I was going through a very difficult time and I just turned to tea for comfort. It sounds kinda cliché but tea kinda saved my life. Once I started drinking tea I started to feel better, my skin was glowing, I was sleeping better, life just kinda became good again and everything was positive again,” said Goodall.

From there, one thing led to another and the tea lover wanted to try other kinds of teas, specifically loose leaf teas.

“When I was looking around I was seeing ginger, turmeric, mint, lemongrass and I’m like we have these things in Jamaica why is nobody doing this? At the time I was working in food retail and I realised that there was a space for something like this and I wanted to do it,” she said.

She explained that when she started the business was fuelled by her passion, US$200 and friends who were influencers.

“I basically just started creating some boxes with two little things of tea, a little infuser, a little vile of sugar and my friends did it very beautifully and we just gave like 10 people and they did their unboxing on Instagram and from there we started this great community of people who just want to take time for themselves, take time to enjoy tea and to do something that’s very good for you,” she stated.

She said now there’s a community online where people are looking out for what’s coming next from Likkle Tea.

“We have a subscription club where every month customers get three branded teas, if they miss it, it’s never coming back ever again. We have tea blending classes where we educate people. I found that we have a big tea community in Jamaica but there’s no space for us to really be us, because a coffee drinker and a tea drinker are two different kinds of people,” Goodall continued.

Although the business has come a long way, the entrepreneur admitted she had to make some sacrifices along the way.

“I was blessed enough to have been working a 9-5 while doing Likkle Tea and while figuring everything out. I went without shoes, parties, clothes, I kept my car as long as I could and everything I made I put back into the business. Right now it is still in the growth phase, it is the only thing I’m doing now and I’m not homeless as yet, so it means I’m doing some things right.”

With that said, Goodall disclosed that her biggest challenge now is what she sees as an opportunity to expand exponentially in the export market. But she noted that it requires finding the right product to export.

“For the last six years, I wouldn’t want to say that I’ve been doing a lot of business but what I really was doing is a proof of concept. At one point I had close to 50 blends and I was trying to figure out the palate of the Jamaican market, the palate of the Caribbean market, what worked, what didn’t work, what I wanted to do that was different and as I tried to hone in and try to create the brand and make the brand more representative of us, I found out that we had a very unique story around tea, and I wanted to share that story and to use tea to share Caribbean stories and experiences. Now we have ten blends,” said Goodall.

Some of the teas offered by the company include: Chai Guy, Coconut Pone, Galloway, Highgate Chai, Jamaican Breakfast, Mahoe Bay, Miss Rosie, Moonshine Darling, Portland Bliss, and Rock Steady.

She explained that each blend has a unique personal or local story which is shared with the customer.

“We have teas like Jamaican breakfast with cacao nibs and cinnamon leaves as opposed to other breakfast teas which are just some low-grade teas they just fuse together. Nobody does Jamaican breakfast like we do and our things are very different. I love to layer flavours so with each tea you’d taste something different,” Goodall pointed out.

But it wasn’t easy to find blends Jamaicans would like. She said she went through many concoctions before arriving at the right ones.

“I work with one importer and it’s a very intensive process because the tea [Camellia sinensis, the scientific name for the tea plant] doesn’t grow in Jamaica. It took a long time to really find the blends that could fuse well with our local botanicals, but we were able to create something spectacular,” she said.

In the meantime, she admitted it’s still a very daunting endeavour, especially for an entrepreneur like Goodall who is keen on ensuring the standard of her products remain high.

“I’m the head, cook, bottle-washer and everything in between, I have a partner who’s more of a silent partner,” she told the Sunday Finance.

“It’s a very labour intensive process but the good thing about it is that I converted my mother’s childhood home in Orange Hill, St James, into a tea garden. So, my uncle actually grows most of the local botanicals that I use in the blends and whatever we don’t grow he has a network of farmers that he buys from in the community, so it’s really giving back to the community. Imagine stripping hundreds of pounds of ginger and turmeric until your fingers are blistered and then dehydrating them, cutting them up, ensuring that they are good to go.”

She explains that she has managed to maintain the quality of her teas so far by closely overseeing the production process.

“For me, it’s not that I don’t want to outsource it, but I have to ensure that what my customers are getting is top tier and clean. We don’t have that sort of thing in Jamaica where we can go and get like a pound of chopped turmeric. Everybody is doing the same thing, so I want to ensure that the turmeric I get is quality. I want to ensure that it’s washed properly. I want to ensure that it’s stripped properly, so I have to ensure that at each step in the process I control and ensure that it is up to a particular standard,” Goodall stated.

Looking ahead, Goodall disclosed: “I’m going to be doing a single serve packet that I can do mass market.”

She is also the distributor for Rishi Tea, Macha and Sparkling Botanicals in the Caribbean which will be in supermarkets very soon.

For now, most of Likkle Tea customers buy directly from the entrepreneur online who inserted that she is able to ship wherever the customer is.

On that note she said’ “I work with very few retailers, I’m very intentional about who I work with”.

Jamaica is known for its myriad of herbs, 830 of which are endemic to the island.