Russian favorite brands?

Kusmi has a lot of Russian-themed marketing, but I don’t know where they’re actually based.

It is my understanding that India and Ceylon are the main tea suppliers to Russia.
I am not Russian (I live in Virginia, USA), but I have a great interest in tea cultures around the world. I have read quite a bit on the subject.
Greenfield Tea, a Russian company with a very English name, is probably the most popular brand in Russia.
Fruit and herbal teas are also very popular with Russians!

Привет Стас, как на счет пуэра?

Most of Russians drink a lot of tea but are not particularly choosy: a lot of basic Assams and black Ceylon. Ahmad tea and Dilmah are common foreign brands but there are many popular local brands like Maisky. Russians drink loose leaf tea way more often than people in Britain or North America and have their own way of steeping it (google “zavarka”).

In the last decade in Moscow and other large cities a new tea subculture appeared with its members focused on better quality black teas from China and puerhs in particular. As a result Russians are currently by far the largest group of customers at yunnansourcing.com, which recently launched a Russian-language version of their site.

Czest Stanislav! :-)
Tea biz is very competitive biz, I doubt anybody will share the knowledge or ideas to help u out:-) Anyway, I don’t care.
There r few RU guys here in KM exporting tea to Russia in larger scale, very low grades in discounted prices ( we r talking few$ per kilo ) . Black , green mostly, some pu-erhs as well.
Some Russians come every year to Yunnan and buy very cheap pu-erh. Some of them even go to Menghai and press the puerh cakes from the cheap material coming from Lincang and proceed the CN “traditional” business model. – Same tea , different wrappers. – So you might see those Jingmai, Laobanzhan etc., now in some tea shops in Moscow, don’t know for what price though. Since RU ruble dropped down dramatically (2x compare to U$ ) Russian people just can’t afford to buy some decent / high grade tea, at least not in amount they used to. There is a Gruzian black ( I believe shai hong type ) on the market now as well which has a good reputation. It is difficult to generalize of course. Sometimes there is somebody who can afford to buy real Gushu tea with blink of the eye buy all tong , but mostly is that RU people just looking for a discounts / vouchers / special offers , complaining that our tea is expensive ( when same time US people say our tea is suspiciously cheap so must be a fake ! ) …just can’t please everybody though :-)
Speak of the drinking tea culture, there are young people who also drink pu-erh instead of the alcohol, which is a good part. But again, due to high prices compare to their income , they just stuck with cheap low quality wet stored "mud fermented " in Gunagzhou. I have few friends who supply those kind of communities gathering in private apartments and drinking the tea together.I tried some of those teas, just not drinkable for me ( we r talking about 2$ for 357g shu pu-erh tea cake ) , and yet I have customers like asking for shu pu-erh with “gasoline” notes ( which is mentioned GZ storage…probably stored too wet and too long ). If u r living back home in PL ( I believe ? ) not much u can’t do I guess, the RU tea market is quite saturated / competitive..check their internet. If u r in CN , u can move to GZ and try same model with others there, but as I said before, very competitive!
I have a friend who went back to RU for holiday and tried to chat about the tea import, found out that most of the tea shops have already linked connections to GZ tea market directly or via Russian sources sitting there.
Even RU site / company Moychai lunched their web in ENG version coz local market is not doing much these days.

Anyway, u r welcome ;-)