Meet Jennifer Commins, the Woman Behind Pluck Tea
She ditched a safe sales gig and poured all her passion — and finances — into starting something new. And succeeded. Here’s how she made it happen.
When Jennifer Commins, the founder behind bougie beverage brand Pluck Tea, says “Pinkies up!”, she really, really means it.
This certified tea sommelier was once just your regular ole luxury furniture sales rep who found herself frustrated by the lack of interesting tea options at the high-end restaurants where she entertained clients.
“We’d have this wonderful dinner and an incredible dessert, and then my coffee-drinking friends would get these beautifully presented, multi-layered coffee and espresso-based beverages,” Commins says. “Meanwhile, I would get a sad little tea bag next to a scratched metal teapot containing the wrong temperature of water. It drove me nuts.”
Commins has been a tea nerd since way before it was cool. She grew up in an expat British household where tea was a daily ritual, and she spent years trying every tea she could get her hands on. But it wasn’t until 2013 that she decided to upgrade her hobby to a hustle.
With three young kids, a mortgage and only a credit card to finance her new venture, she made the leap, leaving her lucrative furniture-selling days behind to launch Pluck. Now Commins’ premium teas — all hand-blended and bagged in Pluck’s Toronto facility — can be found everywhere from upscale restaurants and grocery stores to indie foodie boutiques across the country.
ROOM: How did you become a tea sommelier?
Jennifer Commins: That whole experience of entertaining clients really sparked my desire to learn about food, so I enrolled in the chef’s program at George Brown College in Toronto part time. One day I got an email that they were offering a tea sommelier program, and I thought, “That sounds amazing.” So, I signed up. Then, I discovered that the Tea Association of Canada had a professional course, and that was it. I’m a super nerd and if I’m studying something, I want to get as close to the industry as I can. After a couple of years, I became a certified sommelier.
R: What does one learn in tea sommelier school?
JC: You learn how to recognize and define tea types, about different varietals and cultivars (plants cultivated for specific traits), how to pair tea with foods, about the various methods used to produce tea and how to understand the traditions around the tea cultures in different parts of the world. There’s so much there — you can never know everything there is to know about tea!
R: Why did you decide to make the leap into starting your own company?
JC: I had a boss who I couldn’t deal with anymore, and I thought to myself: “OK, look, I’ve got the certification, I’m going to put $5,000 on a credit card and I’m going to start a tea company.” It was a little bit crazy, but I was obsessed with this idea, and I just couldn’t let it go.
R: Walk us through what it was like when you were first creating your teas. Were you at your kitchen table?
JC: My dining room table! You can’t really grow tea in the Canadian climate, so I sourced the leaves themselves from wholesalers, but then I would blend them and develop my recipes and just kind of let my experience studying food and pairings guide the way. I’d use different spices from my kitchen, stuff I saw at the farmers markets and local ingredients like lavender from Prince Edward County, dried ice-wine grape skins from Niagara and fresh, organic citrus peels from Chaser’s Fresh Juice in Toronto.
R: Was there an “aha” moment when you thought to yourself, “This is actually going to work!”?
JC: Yes! I was running my table at the Wychwood Barns Farmers Market and somebody came through and said, “They’re doing Dragon’s Den auditions today at the CBC, you should go!” I drove down there and I did the best I could, and they invited me back to help them audition new dragons. So, there I am pretend pitching Arlene Dickinson and four guys I don’t know.
Afterwards Arlene came up to me and asked for my business card and said: “My CFO will call you this afternoon.” And I said: “Whoa, whoa, what do you mean? That was real?” And she said “Well, I want it to be real. Do you?” That deal didn’t end up working out, and I didn’t get on the show, but one of the other guys who was in the room that day also approached me afterwards, and he ended up being my first investor.
R: When did you see interest in tea really start picking up in the hospitality industry?
JC: When I started out nobody would take my call — tea was just a three-letter word at the bottom corner of a menu with $2.50 beside it, so getting people to have an interest in tea was a bit of a long road.
One of my very first customers was Jamie Kennedy, one of the most highly respected chefs in Canada. He’s been a real champion of the farm-to-table movement for so many years, and I'll never forget how his eyes lit up when I told him I was using Canadian-grown ingredients in the tea.
When I passed him a sample, he actually just put his hand in the bag and ate it, and I was like “Really?!” I said, “Chef, you’re supposed to steep it.” He said “No, no — this is how I assess the quality of everything that comes into my kitchen.” Things became a bit easier after that because I could go into restaurants and say, “You know, we’re the tea supplier for Jamie Kennedy at Gilead Café.” Doors finally started to open.
What are your three best bits of advice for other entrepreneurs?
1 . Find other founders and connect with them
There’s nothing like surrounding yourself with people who are facing similar challenges. Entrepreneurs don’t need to be in business long to realize that we’re kind of weird. Our families don’t get it. Our partners don’t get it. We walk right up to the edge of risk and stand there and tolerate it — most people want to be 100 metres away from that edge at all times, but we run towards danger. So, I think it’s important to connect with other entrepreneurs at various stages of development, whether they’re just hitting their first sales or they’ve built a $10 million company.
2. Seek out mentors
Make sure that you have mentorship around you for areas that you don’t excel in. It doesn’t have to be a formal situation, it could just be, “Hey, this person knows a lot about accounting, and I’m going take them out to lunch once a month and ask a couple of questions so I can get better at it.”
3. Take care of yourself
Integrating a healthy lifestyle is so important if you want to play the long game as an entrepreneur. If you’re leading a company, you’re the most important person in the mix a lot of the time — your team relies on you, your family relies on you, sometimes it feels like the whole world is on your shoulders. So, it’s important to carve out time to get to the gym, to make your lunches and to prioritize your sleep, which can be really hard to do, especially when you’re in the zone and you want to keep working until two in the morning because you just need to get that project out. But you also need to build up your energy reserves for those days when stuff just goes sideways, because it will!
Award-winning writer and documentary television producer.