Nobody on this project is a customs broker, a freight forwarder or a lawyer, and this is not advice. It is a plain description of a process, with every procedural claim sourced to the authority that owns the procedure and linked so you can check it. Rates, thresholds and regulation numbers change. Where a figure would go stale we have linked the register instead of printing the number.
Decide what you are buying
The single most common reason a first enquiry goes nowhere is that it does not say what form of rooibos it wants. “Rooibos” is four or five different products that move through different companies at wildly different volumes, and a processor who exports in tonnes cannot do much with a request that might mean fifty retail cartons.
The distinctions that matter before you write to anybody:
Bulk loose leaf is the raw trade — sifted, pasteurised, graded dried leaf and stem, shipped by the tonne to be blended or packed elsewhere. This is what most of the companies in our directory actually do, and it is what the export figures are made of.
Private label and contract packing is bulk with your name on it. Several regional processors state that they pack to a customer’s own brand; that is a different conversation, and a different minimum, from buying the raw leaf.
Finished retail product — someone else’s brand, in its own carton — is a distribution arrangement rather than a sourcing one.
Extract is a separate industry again. Rooibos extract goes into cosmetics, drinks and nutraceuticals, and the companies that make it are not always the ones that grow the leaf.
Then there is the one specification that cuts across all four: red or green. Green rooibos is the same leaf without the oxidation step, and it behaves as a different product commercially — the Rooibos Council states that most green rooibos is exported. What green rooibos is.
- Form
bulk leaf, private label, finished retail, or extract - Type
red (oxidised) or green (unoxidised) - Certification you need
organic, Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, kosher, halaal - Your market
it determines the documents, not the tea - Rough annual volume
even a range. It decides who can help you
Shortlist a producer
Rooibos grows commercially in one region on earth — the Cederberg and the Suid-Bokkeveld, in the Western and Northern Cape. That is unusually convenient for a buyer, because it means the entire supply base is a few hours’ drive across, and the processors, packers and co-operatives are concentrated around a handful of towns. Clanwilliam has more of them than anywhere else; Citrusdal, Nieuwoudtville and Wupperthal each have their own.
We publish a directory of nineteen companies that grow, process, pack, export or buy from this region, grouped by what they actually do. Read the rules it is built under before you use it, because they change how you should read it: every entry is the company’s own published account of itself. We have visited nobody and audited nothing. There are no phone numbers, no prices and no ranking — contact details change and a wrong one is worse than none, and a ranking would be an opinion dressed as a finding.
What the directory is good for is narrowing. It tells you who describes themselves as a bulk exporter rather than a retail brand, who is a grower-owned co-operative, who claims which certifications, and who sits where. The approach itself is then yours to make, through the contact route each company publishes.
Two structural things worth knowing before you choose. The industry has both ends of a scale in it: large established processors that have supplied international packers for decades, and small grower co-operatives — Heiveld in the Suid-Bokkeveld and Wupperthal Original — that harvest and process by hand and sell into fair-trade channels in Europe and North America. Which end you buy from is a real decision about your own supply chain, not a detail. Who makes rooibos sets out that landscape.
For a list of processors and packers that is maintained by the industry rather than by an independent site, the South African Rooibos Council publishes its own membership. The Council states that its members represent an estimated 80% of the volume and value of annual rooibos production and sales — which also tells you the list is not complete, and neither is ours.
Ask for a sample
A sample is only useful if you can say what arrived and ask for the same thing again. That means specifying it, and it means asking for the paperwork that travels with it rather than the tea alone.
The specification points are the ones that change what is in the cup and what is in the bag: whether it is red or green, the cut or grade (a long leaf and a fine cut behave completely differently in a teabag machine), the crop year, and the certification status of that particular lot rather than of the company.
The documents matter more than the tea does. Ask for a specification sheet, a certificate of analysis for the lot, and copies of the certificates the company claims. Certification is a checkable fact — our directory lists what each company states about itself, and we have deliberately not checked the certificate registers, which is precisely the thing a buyer should do for themselves.
CBI — the EU-funded export promotion agency, and the best free reference on this — reports that European buyers of herbs commonly ask for pesticide residue reports from an ISO/IEC 17025-accredited laboratory, generally no older than six months, covering several hundred residues. That is buyer practice rather than law, but if you are selling into Europe it is what your own customers will ask you for, so it is worth asking for it now.
- Specification sheet
cut or grade, moisture, origin - Certificate of analysis
for that lot, not a generic one - Certificates claimed
organic, Fairtrade, food-safety scheme — and their numbers, so you can check the register - Crop year
so a repeat order is comparable - Residue report
ISO/IEC 17025 lab, recent
The quantity question, and why we cannot answer it
The question every first-time buyer asks is what the minimum order is. We are not going to give you a number, because not one of the nineteen companies in our directory publishes one, and an invented minimum would be worse than no answer at all — it would either scare off a buyer a producer would have been glad to supply, or waste a producer’s morning.
The blank itself is the finding, and it is worth reading as one. In a trade where the leaf moves by the tonne and the same company may also pack retail cartons, a published minimum would be meaningless across the range of things it sells. The number is set per conversation.
What we can tell you is what moves it. A minimum is a function of the form you are buying — raw bulk leaf sits at one end and private-label packed retail at the other, with a whole production run behind it. It is a function of packaging, because a run of printed cartons has its own economics that have nothing to do with tea. It is a function of certification, since a certified organic or Fairtrade lot has to be segregated. And it is a function of freight, because the shape of a shipment tends to settle around a full or shared container rather than around the tea.
So the productive first question is not “what is your minimum?” It is “here is the form, the certification and the annual volume I am after — is that something you do?” That question can be answered in one reply.
The export documents, and whose job each one is
This is the part that puts people off, and it is mostly a misunderstanding. South African export documentation is an obligation of the South African exporter — the processor or co-operative you are buying from. If you are buying from an established exporter, you do not register with the South African Revenue Service, you do not apply for a phytosanitary certificate, and you do not apply for a certificate of origin. They do. Your job is to know which documents exist and to ask for them.
| Document | What it is | Whose job |
|---|---|---|
| Exporter registration | SARS states that any person, local or foreign, who wishes to export goods from South Africa must register as an exporter. It is done through the Registration, Licensing and Accreditation system on SARS eFiling.SARS | Exporter |
| Phytosanitary certificate | A plant-health certificate issued by the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development, applied for through the eCert platform. Whether one is needed is decided by your country’s import rules, not by South Africa’s.DALRRD / eCert | Exporter |
| EUR.1 movement certificate | The proof of origin that lets you claim the preferential import duty under the SADC–EU economic partnership agreement, the EFTA–SACU agreement or the SACUM–UK agreement. The exporter must be registered under that agreement to issue one.Reported by South African trade-service providers; we have not confirmed this against a SARS primary page | Exporter — ask for it |
| Certificate of analysis, specification sheet, certification certificates | The quality and compliance file for the lot. Not a government requirement; a commercial one, and the one your own regulator will eventually want to see behind you.Commercial practice | Exporter — ask for it |
| Import clearance in your country | Classification, duty, and any health or labelling requirements at your own border.Your customs authority | You |
The one case where this flips: if you intend to be the exporter of record yourself — buying at the farm gate and handling the export leg — then you do need to register with SARS, and there is a specific catch. SARS states that a foreign entity registering as an exporter must nominate a registered agent located in South Africa, and that applications without an approved agent are suspended until one is nominated. That is a real piece of setup, and it is the reason most first-time buyers do not do it.
A word on the customs heading, because it trips people up. Rooibos is not tea in customs terms. Tea is heading 0902, which covers Camellia sinensis, and rooibos is a different plant entirely. It classifies under heading 1211, at the international six-digit subheading 1211.90. Anything longer than six digits is a national code that is only true in one country: the United States has been reported to classify it at 1211.90.9280, and China adopted a dedicated national code, 1211.90.39, from 1 January 2024, cutting its duty from a range of 15–30% to 6% after South Africa pursued a rooibos-specific code at the World Customs Organization. We are not telling you what you will pay — that is your own customs authority’s answer, and the right move is to ask them for a binding ruling before you commit to a shipment.
Your own border — the European Union as the worked example
Every importing country is different, and we are not going to pretend to cover fifty of them. But the European Union is the best-documented case, it is a major rooibos destination, and its shape is broadly the shape of the problem elsewhere — so it is worth walking once.
The governing principle, in CBI’s words, is that the importer is responsible for ensuring compliance with all EU requirements on entry. Not the exporter. That is why the sample-stage document file matters: it is the evidence behind your own compliance, and it is far easier to get before an order than after one.
What that responsibility covers, in practice: a food-safety procedure based on HACCP principles; pesticide residues within the maximum levels set under Regulation (EC) No 396/2005, where a default of 0.01 mg/kg applies to anything without a specific limit, adjusted for the fact that dried leaf is concentrated; contaminant limits covering mycotoxins, heavy metals, pyrrolizidine alkaloids and salmonella; and labelling under Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011.
Separately, the EU applies increased border checks at frequencies of 10–50% to certain products from certain origins, listed in the annexes to Regulation (EU) 2019/1793. Those annexes are revised regularly. We have not checked whether rooibos or South Africa appears in the current version and we are not going to guess — check the regulation as it stands on the day you need the answer.
- Responsibility
the importer’s, on entry - Food safety
a HACCP-based procedure - Pesticide residues
Reg. (EC) 396/2005 — 0.01 mg/kg default - Contaminants
mycotoxins, metals, pyrrolizidine alkaloids, salmonella - Labelling
Reg. (EU) 1169/2011 - Border checks
Reg. (EU) 2019/1793 annexes — check current
Nothing on this page substitutes for your own customs authority and a freight forwarder who moves food. For the EU specifically, CBI is thorough, current and free, and it goes into far more depth than we do here.
One last thing: the name itself
Rooibos holds protected designation of origin status in the European Union, granted by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2021/865 of 28 May 2021. It is reported to be the first African product to receive it.
For a buyer, that has a concrete consequence. Within the EU, the name Rooibos is reserved to product from the demarcated South African area — so a European buyer purchasing from this region is buying the only product that may lawfully carry the name on that market. It is the strongest argument there is for buying at origin rather than through an intermediary who cannot tell you where the leaf came from.
Two cautions. Protection is territorial: what is true in the EU is not automatically true in your market, and we have not checked jurisdiction by jurisdiction. And the demarcated legal area is not the same thing as the region where rooibos actually grows — the regulation names sixteen municipalities, some of them nowhere near the Cederberg. We explain that distinction, carefully, on the plant and the place.
What we cannot tell you yet
Everything on this page is sourced. Here is where the sourcing stops, stated plainly rather than padded over.
| Question | Where it stands |
|---|---|
| What does rooibos cost per kilogram? | Not published by any producer we read, and we will not estimate it. Price depends on form, grade, certification and crop.No source |
| What is the minimum order quantity? | None of the nineteen companies publishes one. Section IV explains what moves the number instead.No source — the blank is the finding |
| Who sends free samples, and how big are they? | No producer we read publishes a sample policy. Ask them directly.No source |
| What are the lead times and freight costs? | Not sourced. These are a forwarder’s answer and they move with the season and the shipping market.Out of scope |
| Does rooibos need a phytosanitary certificate for my country? | Destination-driven, and we have not checked any single destination. Your own plant-health authority owns this answer.Unchecked |
| Which producers are good to deal with? | We do not rank, score or recommend anybody, on any page of this site. Nobody pays us and nobody is going to.Standing policy — why |