Courtesy Avocado Leaf Tea
Thanks to E.M. Forster, we all know the importance of a room with a view. How about a property with a view?
Spouses Sharon Colona and Scott Wibbenmeyer learned exactly what comes with a view while looking for land to build a second home in Temecula, California: an avocado grove. At first, they passed on the property because they knew little about avocado harvesting and were looking to downsize. “I didn’t even know avocados grew on trees,” Sharon says. But like a Siren, the view kept calling to them, so they finally sealed the deal.
Courtesy Avocado Leaf Tea
Sharon Colona
With 550 avocado trees now in their possession, Sharon started researching best practices in harvesting. She came upon the 8-by-8 rule: keeping trees at 8 feet tall and 8 feet wide as a way to harness energy and save water. The practice would require regular trimming, so the next research topic was what to do with all the excess leaves and stems. Mulch? Nope. Tea? Yes.
So was born Avocado Leaf Tea, one year in the making from inception to the first production run: 20,000 canisters of tea recently delivered to their home in Lake Saint Louis for distribution.
Part of Sharon’s research uncovered a number of studies about the health benefits of avocado tea. The tea is brewed throughout the world, and there’s a growing body of research on its medicinal properties. Avocado leaves contain flavonoids, polyphenols, terpenes, and serotonin, according to the research that Colona and Wibbenmeyer conducted. (The company’s website has a page devoted to potential health benefits, with links to scientific studies on the leaves’ properties.) Some of the claims include lowering blood pressure and promoting vascular relaxation, regulating blood sugar, and having anti-inflammatory and anti-viral properties.
Nearly as important as the health benefits, of course, is the taste. Although the tea is well known throughout much of the globe, few people are producing it in the United States. Sharon located one other avocado tea for sale online and found the taste to be too medicinal. In fact, initial attempts to brew their own leaves through an outside tea company yielded similar results, she says. It turns out that roasting avocado leaves produces unpalatable tea.
Through a patent-pending, proprietary method, the couple has found a way to process the leaves with a result that retains the healthy properties and tastes good. Scott says they're excited to join the “avocado momentum” that's sweeping the country by marrying the trend with a traditional tea that so far hasn't been produced in this country.
While the first production run involved a cross-country journey—from California to South Carolina for milling, then to Florida for flavoring, then to Pennsylvania for production, and finally to Missouri for distribution—the next run will centralize all of the work around Temecula. After countless taste tests of the various flavors, Colona and Wibbenmeyer have refined the recipes for lemon, peach, chamomile, and black varieties, alongside the natural tea.
Courtesy Avocado Leaf Tea
Advised to enter their tea into the Global Tea Championship for the tasting notes, the couple was thrilled to win bronze in the Single Serve Herbal category. Next up: The World Tea Expo this month, when someone might be donning an avocado suit to promote a product that people from around the world are ordering through the website, Amazon, and eBay. Here in St. Louis, their first goal is to get the tea into grocery stores. Scott also recently dropped off some of the tea with Planter’s House co-owner Ted Kilgore, who created the signature drink at the couple’s wedding a decade ago, for experimenting.
Courtesy Avocado Leaf Tea
In the grove: Tyler Wibbenmeyer and his father, Scott.
Both Colona and Wibbenmeyer own their own companies (she in real estate and he in advertising) and spend most of their spare time on the tea. “I lay in bed at night making lists,” says Sharon, who also designed the packaging. (Each can retails for $13.99 and brews 30 cups.)
Scott recalls first working with the pickers (the same people who pick the fruit) in the grove to ensure each leaf was cut correctly. He imagines how perplexed they must have been seeing these newcomers, more interested in the leaves than the avocado. Today, however, the couple has become something of a legend in the area for “realizing the money’s in the leaves, not the fruit.”
