Bigelow Tea has received the 2026 Aquarion Environmental Champion Award, its second recognition from Aquarion Water Company following an initial honor in 2018. The award highlights the Connecticut-based tea maker's zero-waste-to-landfill manufacturing operations — a standard the company has maintained continuously since 2012 — alongside its use of Green-e® certified renewable energy across its facilities.
What the Award Recognizes
The Aquarion Environmental Champion Award is presented to businesses demonstrating measurable, sustained commitment to environmental stewardship in the region. Bigelow Tea's repeat recognition underscores that its sustainability practices are not a one-time initiative but an embedded operational standard now spanning more than a decade. Achieving zero-waste-to-landfill status requires diverting all facility waste through reuse, recycling, composting, or energy recovery — a demanding benchmark that many food and beverage manufacturers still struggle to meet.
For foodservice operators and beverage buyers evaluating supplier sustainability credentials, Bigelow Tea's track record offers a concrete data point. As restaurant and hospitality groups face growing pressure from guests, investors, and municipal regulators to demonstrate supply-chain sustainability, sourcing from certified-green producers carries increasing strategic weight.
Why It Matters for Operators
Sustainability certifications at the manufacturer level are becoming a procurement consideration across the hospitality sector. Green-e® certification, administered by the Center for Resource Solutions, verifies that a company's electricity is sourced from renewable generators that meet rigorous environmental and consumer-protection standards. Combined with zero-waste-to-landfill operations, Bigelow Tea's dual credentials position it as a supplier aligned with the environmental procurement goals many hotel food-and-beverage programs and chain restaurant groups are formalizing.
The tea category itself sits at an interesting intersection of restaurant beverage program trends, where operators are expanding hot and cold tea menus to meet consumer demand for non-alcoholic, health-adjacent options. Partnering with suppliers who carry verifiable sustainability records can strengthen an operator's own ESG narrative without requiring additional certification overhead on the operator's side.
Bigelow Tea is a family-owned business and one of the most widely distributed specialty tea brands in the United States. Its back-to-back Aquarion recognitions — eight years apart — suggest the company has institutionalized its environmental practices rather than pursuing awards opportunistically. For industry peers in food and beverage manufacturing, that consistency sets a meaningful operational benchmark. Coverage of sustainability developments in the broader food and beverage space is tracked regularly by Food & Beverage Magazine.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
