For many South Africans, rooibos is simply tea.
It is poured into children’s bottles, served with breakfast, drunk after dinner and kept in kitchen cupboards alongside the familiar household staples. Long before rooibos became a globally traded commodity or appeared on supermarket shelves around the world, the plant was understood through generations of indigenous knowledge.
Today, a cup of rooibos can tell a much larger story.
At Northern Plateau Rooibos, that story begins in the Bokkeveld region of the Northern Cape. It continues more than 300 kilometres away in Salt River, Cape Town, where visitors can sit down for a tasting with Chad Isaacs and discover just how much variation exists within South Africa’s most internationally recognised tea.
A Tea That Belongs to South Africa
Rooibos (Aspalathus linearis) is endemic to South Africa and grows within a remarkably limited part of the country. For this particular tea brand, provenance is central to the brand.
Chad’s tea is sourced from his farm found in a high-altitude landscape within Northern Cape where rooibos has grown for generations. That connection to the land sets Northern Plateau apart from the way many consumers encounter rooibos today.
The Difference Between a Bush and a Commodity
The rooibos industry has grown into an international commercial success. Untintentionally, it has also seeded a disconnect between the global product and the indigenous knowledge that made its use possible in the first place.
Khoi and San communities have used rooibos for generations, and a government-commissioned study ultimately recognised the Khoi and San communities as the holders of traditional knowledge associated with the plant. That recognition became the foundation of the landmark Rooibos Traditional Knowledge Industry-Wide Benefit Sharing Agreement, signed after years of negotiation.
A legal tussle for the patent of rooibos changed the conversation around rooibos. The question was no longer simply who could grow and sell the tea. It became: who had the knowledge, who created the value and who should benefit from its success?
Bringing Rooibos Closer to Home
Northern Plateau Rooibos sits within this broader conversation in a particularly interesting way.
As a Coloured-owned business connected to rooibos farming, the brand offers a more direct relationship between land, production and consumer. That story matters in a country where Coloured farming communities have played a significant role in the history of rooibos cultivation while often remaining on the margins of the industry’s commercial ownership. Research into the rooibos industry has documented how racial inequality shaped access to land, ownership and the economic benefits of rooibos production, even as farming knowledge and labour remained fundamental to the industry’s growth.
Northern Plateau’s approach offers a different model. It brings the person drinking the tea closer to the place where it grows.
Rooibos Is Not One-Dimensional
The Salt River shop offers an opportunity that most supermarket shelves do not: the chance to taste rooibos comparatively.
Northern Plateau Rooibos offers its tea in several forms, including loose-leaf rooibos, mulit-flavouredtea bags and rooibos powder. The format may change, but the brand’s focus remains firmly on 100% pure rooibos rather than heavily flavoured blends designed to disguise the character of the tea itself.
A tasting at Northern Plateau encourages guests to slow down, compare and recognise the individual characteristics of the tea. The experience is as much about education as it is about drinking tea.
Chad’s wealth of knowledge and vivid story-telling brings a deep connection of rooibos cultivation, history and production to the tasting experience; turning what could simply be a retail visit into an introduction to one of South Africa’s most culturally significant plants.
A Tasting Worth Travelling For
Cape Town has no shortage of coffee tastings, wine experiences and cocktail bars.
A rooibos tasting offers something distinctly different. It is also an opportunity to understand that South Africa’s culinary identity is not limited to what is served on a plate.
Sometimes it can be found in a cup.
For travelers interested in the stories behind what they consume, Northern Plateau Rooibos offers more than an introduction to South African tea. It offers a way to trace one of the country’s most valuable indigenous products back towards the land, knowledge and communities that have shaped its history.
And in doing so, it asks guests to reconsider something as familiar as rooibos. Not as a teabag, but as a bush, a landscape, a livelihood and a story that South Africa is still learning how to tell.
