Our Story
Nice to meet you, we’re Pink and Nadi, the founders of ho yum tea, a small and independent tea brand. We founded the company in 2017, bringing together the two cultures we grew up in. Nadi (Nadav Biran) from Israel is a documentary film photographer, while Pink Luk (Luk Sze Wan 陸思韻), a PR marketing specialist who grew up in Hong Kong, where tea was an integral part of her everyday life, long before it became our work. We met in Hong Kong in early 2015, and since then we have worked directly with farmers and tea artisans in China and Taiwan, without middlemen. Over the years, our journeys and work have been documented continuously across a range of platforms and social media.
We founded our first branch in Israel, where our largest community is still based today. In early 2019, we opened the 'Florentin Tea Room' in Florentin neighborhood of Tel Aviv, a unique and dedicated tea hosting space - first of its kind in Israel - where every Friday morning we held open sessions for anyone who wanted to discover the culture and taste real traditional Chinese tea, free of charge. These gatherings grew into culinary gatherings through Eatwith, exhibitions we curated, lectures, and tea ceremonies across the country.
When China’s borders closed in 2020, we set out on a fascinating search for Chinese-style tea in different growing regions in neighboring countries. We traveled to India, Nepal, Taiwan, Thailand and even Georgia, looking for teas suited to gongfu cha brewing. During that period, we also founded our international Blind Tasting Club, an original concept that has continued to evolve and remains active today. After seeing with our own eyes how commercial tea is grown in different countries, we decided to move toward natural, sustainable cultivation without pesticides or chemical fertilizers, with the aim of significantly reducing the use of chemicals. Today, more than 96% of our tea comes from natural, organic, or wild-grown cultivation, and we lead the global conversation and education around clean pesticide-free tea. Since then, we have also independently lab-tested every tea against EU standards, Israeli Ministry of Health requirements, and above all, our own standards.
In 2022, we opened our own studio in a hidden, quiet space in Levinsky Market, where for a year and a half we hosted tastings events, workshops, and tea pairings with Israeli chefs, with whom we still work today to build and tailor tea menus for fine-dining restaurants. After China reopened, we moved to Xiamen 廈門 in Fujian in 2024 and opened a dedicated tea-aging warehouse, one of the most advanced in the world. Xiamen is at the heart of China’s tea industry, just a few hours from the tea mountains and growers we have worked with over the years, in China and Taiwan. Moving to China, into the core of the global tea industry, changed ho yum tea from the ground up and was the biggest leap of our careers. It allowed us to start a new chapter and become pioneers in professional tea tour programs in China and Taiwan, which we run twice a year.
Throughout our years of work, we have lived between Israel and East Asia, between the farmers and tea fields we return to every spring and autumn, and hosting and training our growing community in Israel and around the world. The most important thing we learned during COVID is that we cannot reach the highest levels of quality remotely, waiting for the next shipment to arrive - we have to be there! Today, you can feel the difference in what we bring to Israel and the rest of the world immediately.
Today we also operate branches in Hong Kong, China and Taiwan, and two eCommerce websites serving different audiences. We import and store the tea featured on this site in Israel, in a collection curated for the Israeli palate and local climate, across different quality levels and at the best value we can achieve. On our international platform, we focus exclusively on natural tea at higher grades, for experienced tea drinkers and tea collectors from around the world. Once a year we visit Israel, and throughout the year we visit tea houses and meet tea communities around the world, with lectures, new content and courses. If you do not settle for just any tea, join our quiet WhatsApp group in Hebrew or IG channel to keep up with our journeys, content and activities in Israel and around the world.
Pink & Nadi
