People, networks and knowledge: Zealong

Zealong is the only company to successfully grow and process tea commercially in New Zealand. For Vincent Chen and his father, Tzu Chen, this meant there was very little expertise in New Zealand to help them develop the skills and knowledge they needed. Vincent discusses the range of people they consulted to enable them to produce high-quality tea in New Zealand.

Focus questions

• Who are the people Vincent sought help from?

• What expertise did these people have?

• What did Vincent hope to learn from these people?

• Why did he need to consult people in both Taiwan and New Zealand?

Transcript

Vincent Chen:

During the time the people who helping me in New Zealand here would be the people from the nursery. I would look at the camellia and ask them what to do for that. And also during that time, my father fly between Taiwan and New Zealand a lot, and when he was in Taiwan during that time, he always go to the high mountain tea-growing area to ask our friend – he’s a tea farmer and also he’s a tea-maker – so asking him how do he growing the tea, how do he look after tea plants.

So we all learning from lots of peoples, and of course, some of the tea research centre in Taiwan, they have some of the knowledges from the book. Sometimes, you know, make a mistake and the plants look not healthy, but after we quickly asking those people if they give the right suggestion, and very lucky the plants become healthy strong again.

Acknowledgements: Vincent Chen & Fabien Masionneuve, Zealong Tea Zealong, Eterna Holdings Ltd Camellia Tea House

Palmer’s Gardenworld Inga Boyd Arne Hückelheim http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Vera46 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en Anne Roberts http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en