7 Factors For Picking Your Summer Beverages

Let’s Be Honest

What You Find in Honest Tea (and what you should look for in all bottled teas!)

Wendy Bazilian

1. Real tea leaves, brewed and bottled. That matters!
2. No artificial ingredients — no artificial sweeteners to add sweetness without calories, no unusual or unnecessary preservatives.
3. Fair trade and organic. More than half of their line is Fair Trade CertifiedTM and moving toward 100%. And all Honest Tea products are certified organic. That’s ‘wow’!
4. Less sugar. Many green teas are either plain (bitter and unappealing to some) or end up looking like sodas with all the sweeteners. Honest teas have between 0 (no sugar) and up to 80 calories in 16 ounces from sugar, honey or agave syrup (versus 140 calories (9 tsp sugar) in some bottled tea competitors which is pretty close to what you get in a regular soda).
5. Antioxidants (and naturally-occurring). Third party testing has shown that this bottled tea has EGCG levels comparable (sometimes higher!) than home-brewed tea. And it’s from the real tea in the bottle; it hasn’t been ‘boosted’ with ‘extra’ antioxidants to make it look good on paper.
6. A commitment to reducing the carbon-footprint. Sure, a bottle is a bottle. . .but if you’ve forgotten your thermos and find yourself thirsty, this one made from PET plastic, free of phthalates, and requires less energy to make and to ship. And the bottle is ‘thinner’ than before, 22% lighter and 100% fully recyclable.
7. It’s (almost) all they do at Honest Tea—tea and tea beverages. Unlike many major beverage manufacturers that have a wide range of beverages and sometimes also foods, Honest Tea is simply tea and tea blends—and for kids, much lower sugar fruit juices (no caffeinated tea for them)—all the time.

In a word, Honest.