Numi Organic Tea: Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim

How I Built This with Guy Raz

• Episode: Numi Organic Tea: Reem Hassani and Ahmed Rahim
• Website: How I Built This with Guy Raz
• Feed URL: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510313
• Duration: 01:11:07
• Published: 2021-07-05 06:10

When they were in their 20s, Reem Hassani and her brother Ahmed Rahim were not the kind of people you'd expect to launch a multi-million dollar business. Reem was a California artist moonlighting as a substitute teacher, and Ahmed had been living the bohemian life of a photojournalist in Europe. But these two children of immigrants from Iraq had an idea: to introduce the dried lime tea they remembered from their childhood to the U.S. Working out of Reem's 600-square-foot apartment in Oakland, the siblings learned all about the challenges of lining up importers, packagers, and retailers to launch a premium loose-leaf tea brand—meant to be slowly steeped and savored. More than twenty years after it's launch in 1999, Numi Organic Tea is a privately held B Corporation that sells tens of millions of dollars of Fair Trade, organic tea every year.