Interviews

In this interview with the founder of the Sri Lanka’s largest and most global tea brand, Dilmah, Merrill J. Fernando recounted his early engagement with the tea industry and how he built a global brand. Born in 1930 in a rural village in British-ruled Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) he recalled how he was exposed to tea plantations from a young age. He described his early fascination with tea, noting that the coveted positions in tea tasting and trading were usually reserved for British expatriates. He recalled his surprise when selected to join the first group of Ceylonese to be trained in tea tasting, trading, and marketing at the world’s finest tea school at Mincing Lane, London, where he learned about the blending and mixing strategies used to reduce Ceylon tea content and increase profit.

Returning to Sri Lanka years later, he was recruited by a tea exporting company called A. F. Jones and Co. Ltd. which by the mid-1950s was selling tea in bulk to international blending and packing tea companies. With a major political regime change in 1956, Fernando recounted the government beginning to seize control of foreign-owned tea estates, prompting the Jones family to leave the country. Fernando was able to acquire the estate, but after the nationalization of tea plantations in 1971-72 and conflicts with the plantation shareholders, Fernando stepped down to start his own business, MJF Exports, Ltd. MJF supplied bulk tea to international trading companies and quickly became the fourth largest exporter of bulk tea to Australia and New Zealand. One major retailer in Australia later agreed to source its brands from MJF, and by the mid-1970s all Australian retailers used MJF for sourcing their house brands.

Having earned the confidence of major retailers, Fernando recalled his decision to start his own brand, Dilmah, to “bring integrity back into tea” by introducing single origin tea to compete with commodity tea. The interview described Fernando’s early setbacks following the outbreak of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 1983 when a terrorist threat to put arsenic in Sri Lankan exports, but discussed Dilmah’s quick recovery and growth, even though the civil war lasted until 2009. In 2016 Dilmah tea was sold in over 100 countries. Fernando repeatedly emphasized the importance of retaining a sense of social responsibility, and in 2003 launched a charity called the MJF Charitable Foundation to provide aid to the underprivileged.

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