Chinese tea is standing at a crossroads of transitioning from "empiricism" to "industrial thinking".
From June 24 to 26, the "2026 Tea Industry Industrialization Joint Investigation Activity" sponsored by the All Media of China Cooperation Times · Tea Weekly was held in Mount Huangshan City, Anhui Province. More than 30 leaders of tea enterprises gathered in Huizhou, taking "seeing the industrialization of Chinese tea" as the main line, visited three industry benchmark enterprises, namely Xie Yuda Tea Co., Ltd., Mount Huangshan Hydraulic Tea Industry Co., Ltd., and Mount Huangshan Super Factory of Small Pot Tea, and invited the relevant leaders of three enterprises and Chen Zhenlin, the general manager of Anhui Jiexun Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd., to share the path and thinking of the enterprise in industrialization exploration with everyone from the front-line practical experience.
The China Cooperation Times Tea Weekly has launched a series of reports on the "Industrialization of Chinese Tea" from the perspective of industry observers, using vivid cases to stimulate industry speculation and explore feasible solutions for the transformation of China's tea industry towards modernization and industrialization.
In recent years, with the continuous development of intelligent manufacturing, the curtain of China's tea industrialization transformation has slowly begun. The Chinese tea industry is gradually breaking away from the low price game of agricultural products and entering a comprehensive competition in brand, technology, culture, supply chain, experience and other aspects.
Tea processing is one of the core links in the tea industry, and its industrialization level directly affects the quality of tea. In February 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and five other departments jointly issued the "Guiding Opinions on Improving the Quality and Upgrading of the Tea Industry (2026-2030)", which pointed out the direction for the industrial development of China's tea industry: the "Opinions" placed "improving the level of industrial technological innovation" as the top priority task, emphasized "orderly promoting the transformation of production and processing to clean, standardized, automated, and intelligent", and planned to include tea color sorting and grading equipment (hereinafter referred to as "color sorting machines"), intelligent processing control systems, etc. in the "first (set)" policy support scope.
As the core equipment of modern tea processing, the color sorter relies on photoelectric technology to identify the color, shape, size and other characteristic differences on the surface of materials, and uses high-speed airflow to remove materials with different colors or defects, achieving automatic sorting of materials and unified raw material grading standards. It has multiple values of reducing labor, energy consumption and stabilizing quality, and has become a key carrier for empowering the industrial development of the tea industry with new quality productivity.
Actually, the tea color sorter is an imported product.
In the 1980s, due to the need for machine screening of grain to improve quality and efficiency, China began to introduce large beige color sorting machines from Japanese brands such as Anxi, Toyo, and British brands such as Sotex. In 1994, the Nuclear Industry Physical and Chemical Engineering Research Institute developed the MMS-24A color sorter, filling the gap in the development and production of domestic color sorters. In 2000, Anhui enterprise Meiya Optoelectronics developed a digital double-sided color sorter, breaking the monopoly of foreign brands in the domestic market.
In 2008, tea color sorting machines were not yet popular in China, and only a few tea companies used tea color sorting machines from South Korea and Japan, with prices as high as 1 million yuan per machine.
From the perspective of technological evolution, tea color sorting machines have undergone three key leaps. During the single machine stage around 2005, the processing capacity was only 200 to 300 kilograms per hour, with a non tea substance removal rate of about 60% and poor stability, requiring manual selection; Entering the online stage in 2015, the equipment processing capacity increased to about 1000 pounds per hour, with a rejection rate of over 90%, and efficiency and stability significantly improved; In 2025, color sorting machines will enter the era of super intelligent agents, and industrial intelligent production line solutions will gradually replace single machine operations. The processing capacity of the production line will reach 2500 pounds per hour, and the non tea substance removal rate driven by AI intelligent large models will exceed 99%. The equipment can be used stably for more than 10 years. The intergenerational leap of color selection technology provides technical equipment support for the industrial transformation of the tea industry.
New quality productivity is driving the transformation of tea from an "agricultural product" to a "standardized commodity". Traditional tea processing relies on manual experience and sensory judgment, making it difficult to form standardization. The widespread popularity of new quality productivity represented by color sorting machines has enabled tea processing to have quantifiable technical standards at every stage, from fresh leaf grading to dry tea impurity removal, with industrial level standardization capabilities. The scale effect brought by supply chain business forces brands to upgrade their technology and optimize production capacity. The profound significance of this transformation lies in the fact that tea is no longer just an agricultural product, but a standardized product that can achieve controllable quality, stable supply, and predictable scale like industrial raw materials.
Industry integration and scaling are inevitable trends in the industrial development of the tea industry. Chen Zhenlin believes that standardization and industrialization are the future directions of the tea industry, and the living space of small and medium-sized workshops and small refining and processing plants will continue to narrow. Large scale and standardized factories at the top of the region will become mainstream.
Firstly, the cost threshold has increased. Traditional tea processing relies on manual picking, resulting in high labor costs. Small and medium-sized workshops and refined processing plants, with short management chains and flexible labor methods, can still maintain operations in the local market. Although intelligent equipment such as color sorting machines require heavy investment, the cost is extremely low after they are put into use. Once the capacity utilization rate reaches a break even point, the processing costs of large-scale enterprises will be significantly reduced. When the processing costs of top enterprises are reduced to the lowest level, price competition no longer exists.
The second is to improve the quality benchmark. After the large-scale application of color sorting machines, the quality benchmark of tea has gradually been raised. In the past, small workshops were able to maintain their presence in the local market by offering low prices. Nowadays, consumers and supply chain purchasers have increasingly high demands for cleanliness, stability, and standardization. Small and medium-sized workshops and refined processing plants lacking intelligent processing equipment are difficult to surpass in quality and match in efficiency, and it is only a matter of time before they are eliminated by the market.
