Using flavourings in teas is a common & misunderstood practice - and something we get asked about a lot at Bird & Blend. In this post you will learn which flavourings are used in teas, what it really means & how they are applied, as well as why we think they can be a good thing!
We hope we can take away some of the mystery, because flavouring is a much less complicated thing than it sounds, and it helps to create the magical, delicious teas that we all love to enjoy.
Flavouring in a nutshell
At its heart, a flavouring is simply an oil, scent or essence, made from natural ingredients like fruits, herbs & plants that captures a smell or taste in concentrated form. It's the same idea as a chef using a vanilla essence or a squeeze of lemon zest, applied the way the tea industry has for hundreds of years: scenting the leaf.
These oils & essences need a carrier to help them apply evenly. With our leaf teas, the flavouring is carried in a liquid base that evaporates off during production, leaving just the scent behind on the leaf. With our powders, such as matcha, the flavouring is carried on tiny, food-safe starch granules, which simply dissolve into your cup along with the rest of the powder. Either way, nothing sticks around except the flavour it was there to deliver.
So when you see ‘flavouring’ or ‘natural flavouring’ on one of our packs, it's not a mysterious additive. It's a concentrated, natural way of making sure your tea tastes as good as it smells, made from real ingredients, applied in tiny amounts, with nothing left behind but the taste.
Learn more about scenting & flavouring teas
Flavouring tea, sometimes also called scenting, is a practice used across the tea industry & in fact in many of your favourite teas – Earl Grey or jasmine teas for example. Scenting teas with oils & extracts has been used in the tea industry for hundreds of years.
Tea leaves absorb aroma really well, so it is easy to add other scents & flavours to our favourite teas. The first scented teas were perhaps jasmine green teas, created in China where jasmine blossoms were layered in with the tea leaves, and some of the natural oils would seep into the leaves. In more modern times, we can get the same effect more conveniently and on a larger scale if we spray the jasmine oil onto the leaves.
This is also the same method used to scent one of the nation’s most favourite tea blends – Earl Grey. All of the Earl Grey you have ever tasted will have been a black tea leaf scented, or flavoured, with bergamot – a citrus fruit plant. Again, the flavouring is applied by spraying the leaves with the oil or scent.
Modern day flavourings – natural or not?
As blending specialists, our ethos is to create teas that are 'fun, tasty and accessible to all' and we use all sorts of ingredients in our teas to create our fun flavour combinations- such as tea leaves, herbs, flower petals & dried fruits. We sometimes also use cake sprinkles, chocolate pieces & flavourings too.
We use this same flavouring- or scenting- method in some of our teas. All of the flavourings that we use are made primarily from natural ingredients: they are allergen-free, they are vegan, and they are food safe – obviously!
Many of our jasmine-scented teas are still scented the traditional, ‘natural’ way, some of the flavouring oils we use are purely herbal extracts, such as peppermint or orange oil. In these cases, we can say we use ‘natural’ flavourings or extracts.
In some of our tea blends, we use flavourings that are not able to be labelled ‘natural’, but the reason why might surprise you. Due to EU food labelling regulations (which the UK still follows), you are unable to call a flavouring ‘natural’ unless 95% or more of the ingredients used in the flavouring is from natural materials from plants. However, very often the natural oils & essences need a ‘carrier’ to make it stable & usable - and just that small fraction of the content means it can no longer be described as ‘natural flavouring’.
Why are flavourings used?
In the tea industry, it is common to use flavouring. Only using natural flavouring would not be possible, as some of the flavourings or scents wouldn’t be as stable, long-lasting, or flavourful.
It also means flavouring houses can produce their scents even when the fruit or herb isn’t in season, or is perhaps hard to get hold of. Odd as it sounds, sometimes you can get a better flavour or scent by using other natural ingredients and a carrier than the one ingredient you are trying to represent.
For example, to create a green apple flavouring oil, it is rare to find any actual apple in there at all as combinations of other fruits and ingredients can create a stronger, more apple-like scent. These ingredients are natural, meaning they exist in nature, but are put together in a lab or mixed with other ingredients, including the carriers we mentioned earlier (often an alcohol base).
Flavours & flavourings are completely safe, natural & used across the industry to create some of the most popular and enjoyed tea blends, from large supermarket chains to small independents like us. It is also common in the wider food and beverage industry as well as other household products - including crisps, toothpaste, juices, yoghurt, chocolates & confectionery!
Are flavoured teas bad for you?
We think flavoured teas are misunderstood and (unfairly) sometimes viewed negatively as either ‘unnatural’ or ‘bad for you’. There is nothing ‘bad for you’ in the flavourings we use to scent our teas. They hold no nutritional content, calories or sugar & have no effect on the tea or the drinker, other than to change its taste and aroma.
They are made from natural, safe, vegan & allergen-free sources and are created and tested ethically. They are a perfectly normal and helpful way of creating better & new flavours in tea.
There can also be a very purist opinion in the tea industry that flavourings shouldn’t be used, which as lovers of magical & exciting flavours of tea we disagree with for many reasons. We believe that is what makes us so special!
When creating blends (which is what we do best!), flavourings are incredibly helpful. We use flavourings the most in our fruit teas, usually to make an existing flavour from an ingredient more powerful.
For example, strawberry pieces smell great and add a little taste, but not enough to create a really flavourful cup of fruit tea, so we enhance the flavour with flavouring. We know our customers are fed up of having rubbish-tasting ‘fruit’ teas, so we work hard to create a mug of fruit tea that tastes of more than dishwater!
We also focus on blending perfect teas for all sorts of people, lifestyles & situations so many of our teas have no flavourings in them at all, not even natural ones or fruit essences. So, there should be plenty of choice for our wide range of customer needs & preferences.
What about ultra processed foods (UPFs)?
With all the recent chat about ultra processed foods (UPFs), we get asked more & more whether flavourings mean our teas count as one. It's a great question, and one we're happy to talk about openly!
The systems used to classify UPFs (like NOVA) work by spotting certain markers in a product, and flavouring can be one of them, natural or not. This can mean that anything containing flavourings is flagged as a UPF, but that doesn’t actually tell you anything about the quantity, nutritional impact, or health risk of a product.
This makes for one of the liveliest debates in nutrition science right now! Critics point out that NOVA treats a trace of aromatic oil finishing off a cup of tea the same way it treats a whole additive package that’s totally shaping a completely artificial kind of product.
That’s because it's checking simply for the presence of something, not the amount. Others defend that approach, arguing it's exactly what stops every food company from saying "ah, but it's only a tiny bit" about every single additive. We can see merit in both sides. What we'd rather do than argue the label is just show you what's actually in our blends: real tea, real fruit & herbs, and a genuinely small amount of flavouring doing one small job.
Why are the terms so confusing?
If you've ever squinted at an ingredients list & wondered why it just says ‘flavouring’ with no other detail, you're not alone, and we wish the rules allowed us to be clearer, too!
Here's how it works. Food labelling law gives us only two options for describing a flavouring on an ingredients list: ‘flavouring’ or ‘natural flavouring’. That's it. There's no in-between, and no room to say much more.
The word ‘natural’ is also more tightly controlled than most people realise. We're only allowed to call something a ‘natural [X] flavouring’ if at least 95% of it comes from the ingredient it’s named after. So a ‘natural strawberry flavouring’ has to be made out of at least 95% actual strawberries. If a flavouring is a blend of a few natural sources, rather than just one dominant one, it has to be labelled just ‘natural flavouring’, with no further detail on the pack itself.
Where we think this gets confusing is that the same word, ‘flavouring ’, has to cover a huge range of things. A trace amount of pure peppermint oil and a combination of several natural fruit extracts are described identically on the label, even though they're quite different in character. The law asks us to be accurate, but it doesn't really ask us to be clear, and we think there's a difference between the two.
Our approach is to work within these rules as helpfully as we can: naming a specific ingredient wherever the recipe allows it, and using pages like this one to explain, in plain English, what's actually behind the word on the pack. If you're ever curious about a specific blend, our product pages and team are always the quickest way to get a straight answer.
We hope this dive into the world of flavourings answers some of your questions. If you’d like to know more, feel free to get in contact with us via our website chat or email info@birdandblendtea.com.
