Text by Annie Meadows • Photography Courtesy of Tea Chest Hawaii
Tea Chest Hawaii’s passion
Tea Chest Hawaii is an award-winning gourmet tea company based in Honolulu on the island of Oahu. Proprietors Satomi and Byron Goo have been offering fine teas since 1995.
Byron, who was born and raised in Hawaii, lived in Taiwan in the late 1980s and noticed that “tea was highly developed and quite the beverage of choice, unlike in America where it was still just two colors—green and black.” As he explains, the food scene in America, particularly in Hawaii, was changing rapidly in the 1990s: Food Network had turned so many of us into foodies, Starbucks coffee shops were changing the way we thought about coffee, Hawaiian regional cuisine was finding its footing, and fine dining was becoming more than steak and lobster.
When Byron and his wife, Satomi, launched Tea Chest Hawaii in 1995, Stephanie Kendrick, the food editor of the local newspaper in Honolulu, invited Byron to lunch with her and Chuck Furuya, one of only 13 Master Sommeliers in America at that time. The trio talked for hours concerning the evolution of the food-and-beverage industry in Hawaii. Chuck made the case that what had happened to wine in the 1980s was now happening to coffee right before their very eyes in the 1990s. What would the next beverage wave be? All three lunch attendees bet that it would be tea.
In 2004, Tea Chest Hawaii received critical acclaim as teamakers when their Original Blend Nilgiri Iced Tea won Best Iced Tea in America in a tasting competition sponsored by the Specialty Tea Institute. The Goos’ passion, what they see as their business’s kuleana (responsibility), is to help build a tea industry in Hawaii that complements, rather than competes with, the state’s world-renowned coffee industry. The couple is pleased that they have been able to work with local farmers to put sustainable crops in the rich ground of Hawaii and to help build the manufacturing base to support their local industry, resulting in tea that is grown in Hawaii and made in the USA. “That fact alone is exciting to me!” exclaims Byron.
