Emma Heke at her stall - Nelson Saturday Market
Meet Emma Heke, the self-described Tea Lady behind Heke Homemade Herbals, a business born from what she calls “a love of tea and a loathe of lawnmowing”. What started in 2014 with four hand-labelled blends made around the kitchen table has grown into more than 80 teas, all made in Nelson.
The first time Emma took her herbal teas to the Nelson Market, she harvested half the herbs in her garden. She dried them, blended them, packaged them with handmade labels and took them along to see what would happen. She sold out. Three weeks later she went back and sold out again, this time with a waiting list.
Today the kitchen table has given way to two purpose-built cabins on her Nelson property. Emma creates the recipes, organises herbs coming in from growers around New Zealand, imports what isn’t grown here, blends the teas, packs them and sends them out to customers around the country.
“Literally everything is done by hand and by one person.”
From garden to teacup
The original idea was to create a business from the steep urban section around Emma’s Nelson home. She had been growing organically there since 2002 and, over time, had created what she describes as a permaculture-type food forest. The soil is now rich and fertile and the way the garden has been developed means it largely looks after itself through Nelson’s hot, dry summers without additional watering. Some of Heke’s herbs still come from there. The garden couldn’t keep up for long, though.
As demand grew, Emma began working with organic growers elsewhere in New Zealand. They now supply much of what goes into the teas, while Emma imports ingredients that simply aren’t grown here.
Ask Emma which of her own teas she reaches for most often and there isn’t really one answer: it depends on the time of day and the season. Her regulars are: English Breakfast, Spicy Red Chai, Breathe, Cleanse, Apple Rose and Kawa Kapow. In summer, Purple Plush comes out as an iced tea or a cocktail base.
What hasn’t changed is how hands-on the business remains. A normal busy day starts early. Emma is up around 5am, then heads to the cabins at about 7am with a list of orders.
The morning is spent making tea and packing courier bags. By around 2pm she’s usually finished the tea work and can get back into the garden. On Fridays, there’s another job: packing the car for Saturday at the Nelson Market, which has been part of the Heke story since 2015.
Emma says Nelson has been a particularly supportive place to build the business. She did small business and advanced business management courses locally and in 2017 won the Business Innovation Award at the Nelson Tasman Chamber of Commerce Awards.
The Market has always been her most direct connection with customers. Visitors discover the teas while they’re in Nelson, take them home and then order more through the website.
And when somebody tries a Heke tea for the first time?
Emma hopes they notice the colours, the textures, the quality and the taste.
There’s a strong visual element to the teas, which perhaps isn’t surprising given her arts background. Open a packet and you will see petals, leaves, fruit, herbs and all sorts of colour even before the kettle has boiled.
The road before tea
Emma studied Fine Arts at Otago and teaching at Massey, then spent seven years living and travelling overseas in her twenties. Back in New Zealand, she taught high school art and photography in the North Island for 12 years. Later, she moved to Nelson as a solo mum and studied television production at NMIT. That led to three documentary-style films. One, OURS, won a Parliamentary Green Ribbon Award and screened on Air New Zealand’s international in-flight entertainment for three months.
Another film came out of a six-month trip around New Zealand in a little van with her then seven-year-old son. They homeschooled on the road while Emma filmed around 50 people running businesses and building lifestyles in very different ways, from garage operations through to multimillion-dollar ventures. What interested her was that they were finding ways to make a living without “wrecking the planet in the process”.
That trip also helped give her the idea for Heke Homemade Herbals, bringing together a lot of things Emma had been interested in for years. She had studied naturopathy in her late teens and early twenties, had been interested in herbs for years and went back to study herbal medicine at the New Zealand School of Naturopathy before starting the business.
What she is proud of
Only two Heke teas have ever been entered into the Outstanding NZ Food Producer Awards and both won silver medals: Awake & Aware in 2019 and Soothe in 2020.
However, Emma is most proud of having stayed true to the reasons she started Heke Homemade Herbals in the first place, even after more than a decade: to make tea to a really high standard, to keep tea affordable and accessible and to help make organic loose leaf herbal tea a more everyday thing.
The business is much bigger than those first four blends made around the kitchen table and Emma is still the Tea Lady behind it.
Loved your Heke tea?
Explore the full Heke Homemade Herbals range at hekehomemadeherbals.co.nz