Tea Processing: From Hand Rolling to ABB Robots

Every tea bag starts as a fresh green shoot that someone picked by hand or by machine. Between the bush and the box, tea processing withers, rolls or cuts, oxidises, dries, grades and packs the leaf, and each step has slowly moved from hands to machines. This post follows that path, from Chinese producers kneading leaves in the Wuyi Mountains to the CTC machine of 1930 and the first automatic tea bag packers. It then looks at a new tea plant that opened in Virginia this month and at where ABB robots fit on the packing and palletizing end of a tea line.

A worker tips sacks of freshly plucked green leaf at a tea factory before it goes up the conveyor. Photo: shankar s. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How tea was plucked, withered and rolled by hand

For most of tea's history, people did every step by hand. Chinese producers steamed fresh leaves and dried them, and by the time Lu Yu wrote The Classic of Tea they also pressed steamed leaf paste into bricks that travelled and stored well. Black tea came later. In the early 1600s, producers in the Wuyi Mountains of Fujian began kneading sun-withered leaves to bruise them, then let them oxidise fully and dried them in the sun. On cool, cloudy days the leaves were finished indoors in warm rooms and smoked dry over pine fires, which is how lapsang souchong got its smoky taste.

A postcard from about 1907 showing pluckers with baskets on a tea estate. Photo: New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The British plantations in India and Ceylon kept the same basic steps but scaled them up. Pluckers picked the top two leaves and a bud into baskets on their backs, a job that on many estates is still done by hand. The leaf was spread out to wither so it lost moisture and went limp, then rolled to break the cells and start oxidation, first by hand on tables and later in mechanical rollers driven by belts. Factories then dried and sorted the tea and packed it into wooden chests for shipping.

An old tea rolling machine on display at Damro tea estate near Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka. Photo: Yercaud-elango / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 1930, at the Amgoorie Tea Garden in Assam, Sir William McKercher brought the first crush, tear, curl machine into service. Its pairs of toothed rollers cut the leaf into small hard pellets in place of the long twisted strips of orthodox rolling. CTC spread over three decades from 1950, fastest in India and Africa, and today more than 80 percent of Indian tea is made this way. The small grades it produces brew dark and fast, which made them a natural fit for the tea bag.

Machinery in the CTC tea packing section of a tea factory, with an operator beside a sack. Photo: shankar s. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Tea processing lines today and where ABB fits

Packing was automated around the same time. Tea bags date from a 1903 US patent by Roberta Lawson and Mary McLaren of Milwaukee, and New York importer Thomas Sullivan sold silk bags from about 1908. In 1929 Adolf Rambold built Pompadour, the first automatic tea bag packing machine, for the German company Teekanne. It made 35 gauze bags a minute. His Constanta machine of 1949 made 160 double-chamber bags a minute, and its 1990 successor, Perfecta, makes up to 400. William Hermanson patented the heat-sealed paper tea bag in 1930.

A tea bag machine with reels of filter paper, thread and tags. Photo: Marion Golsteijn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The latest news comes from the United States. On 5 October 2026 Traditional Medicinals announced that its new $47 million, 110,000 square foot plant in Franklin County, Virginia, had started producing tea. It is the herbal tea maker's second factory after Sebastopol, California, it runs all-electric with no fossil fuels burned on site, and the first product off the line was Throat Coat, made with slippery elm sourced in Appalachia. The company says the site will ramp up to make the same range of more than 60 teas as its California plant.

Sacks of made tea in the packing and despatch section of a tea factory. Photo: shankar s. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

We found no published ABB project in a tea factory, so this part is about how existing ABB robots could fit. Tea bag machines already form, fill and seal at high speed, and the work after them is pick and place: putting bags or envelopes into cartons and cartons into cases. That is the job of the IRB 360 FlexPicker, a delta robot that picks small items from a moving belt with conveyor tracking and PickMaster vision. At the end of the line, IRB 460 and IRB 660 palletizers stack cases and heavy sacks of bulk tea onto pallets. Our post on case packing lines shows these robots at work.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items at high speed. Photo: ABB

What comes next for tea factories and robots

In the next few years the most likely robot jobs in tea are the ones already automated in coffee, snacks and other dry foods: case packing, palletizing and moving pallets to the warehouse, where Flexley Mover AMRs could carry loads between packing and despatch. Layouts are usually tried out in RobotStudio first, so a plant can check cycle times and reach before buying hardware. Tea blenders change products often, and robots that switch grippers and pallet patterns from a recipe make short runs cheaper.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking cases at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

The leaf end of the process is harder. Withering, rolling and drying already run on dedicated machines, and the open questions there are about sensors and control, for example measuring moisture or oxidation and adjusting the line. Plucking is the hardest job of all. Shears and motorised harvesters exist, but fine plucking of two leaves and a bud on steep, uneven slopes is still mostly done by hand, and a robot that can match it at a price estates can afford has not appeared.

Bags of fresh leaf waiting at the foot of a conveyor inside a tea factory. Photo: shankar s. / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Cost and skills are the main brakes. Many tea factories sit on estates in rural areas and work with small margins, so a palletizing cell must pay for itself quickly and be simple to run. Cobots such as GoFa, which can be taught by moving the arm by hand, lower that bar for small packers. Safety matters wherever robots share space with workers, and tools like SafeMove set speed and zone limits in the controller. A plant like the new one in Virginia, ramping up to more than 60 herbal teas, is exactly the kind of mixed, short-run packing where that flexibility counts.

An ABB four-axis palletizing robot with a layer gripper in a packaging line cell. Photo: ABB

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