WELCOME TO TEA RUNNERS CANADA 🍁

Please note this FAQ is intended for tearunners.ca, our Canadian website.

For our American site, please visit tearunners.com

Our Mission

Our mision is to source top quality teas from all over the world and bring them to you in a simple, highly enjoyable discovery experience.

We offer the most flexible loose leaf tea subscription on the market, with full capability to customize every tea in your monthly boxes.

Many of our teas are award-winners from the Global Tea Champioship, and almost all our teas come from award-winning companies.

How Our Subscriptions Work

All our subscriptions ship for FREE via Canada Post Lettermail. Our packages are designed to fit in a standard mailbox or through a mail slot.

Our subscriptions are fully customizable from 25+ monthly tea options, with new options every month.

Your first box is customized on checkout and will ship within 48 hours (Mon-Fri.) All subsequent boxes are customizable between the 25th and last day of the month.

For example: You can customize your February box between Jan 25-31.

You will be notified via email when it's time to customize your next shipment.

If you do not customize your shipments, we will send you our professionally curated monthly selections for the box you're subscribed to.

For more details see how to customize your box.

Your first box will ship within 48 hours, Monday to Friday.*

In Canada, we ship all our subscription boxes via Canada Post Lettermail, which unfortunately does not come with tracking.

Shipments are sent from Vancouver, BC and usually take 8-14 day to arrive anywhere in Canada.

*New subscriptions created after the 25th of the month will not ship until the first week of the following month.

Regular monthly boxes ship around the 5th of the month, depending on weekends and holidays.

Billing for recurring subscriptions happens on the 1st of the month.

Example: You are billed on April 1st for the April box, which ships the around April 5th.

All normal subscriptions renew on the terms you selected during sign up -- however, you can use our powerful subscription management tools to change your subscription settings at any time.

You can cancel or pause your subscription at any time.

Gift subscriptions do not renew by default.

Our powerful subscription management tools allow you to skip shipments, change your delivery schedule, or pause for however long you like.

Yes. We offer monthly, bi-monthly and tri-monthly subscription options. 

You can switch between delivery schedules anytime.

Cancelling your subscription is easy and can be done from within your account (or by contacting us) at any time.

Cancelling your subscription prevents any future renewals, but it does not undo prepaid shipments.

For example: If you purchased a 6-month subscription and cancel after 3 boxes, you will still be shipped the remaining 3 boxes but your account will not renew.

Cancelling on the 1st of the month
Renewals take place on the 1st. If your account renewed and you cancel immediately after, this does not undo the renewal. If you wish to cancel a renewal, please contact us.

CANCELLATION POLICY: If you purchase a 6-month subscription and decide to cancel after 2 months, and you do not want any more boxes and ask for your money back, you will be refunded on a pro-rated basis.

Gift Subscriptions

Gift subscriptions work the same way as Normal subscriptions, except for a few minor details.

No, gift subscriptions do not renew. If you purchase a 3-month gift subscription, it will automatically expire after the 3 months are up.

We make it easy for you to renew your gift, or for your gift recipient to takeover their account with their own payment method.

Our powerful subscription management tools allow the gift buyer and the gift recipient to control the same account. This is especially handy if youre purchasing for someone who isn't tech-savvy.

Both buyer and recipient can customize boxes, edit shipments, pause, etc.

Gift recipients cannot customize their first box (because in most cases it's a surprise), but the gift buyer can do it for them on checkout.

After creating an account, the gift recipient can customize all future shipments.

Yes you can. All gift messages are automatically sent via email at the date/time you selected when purchasing the gift.

At this time we do not offer printed gift messages to be inserted into the box.

Billing

  • When you sign up for a Tea Runners subscription you are billed right away.
  • Renewals always happen on the 1st.
  • You can change your next renewal date in your account.
  • All prices on tearunners.ca are in Canadian Dollars.

About the tea

Use this section for any descriptive text you need to fill out your pages or to add introductory headings between other blocks.

Every box comes with 4 pouches of tea and each pouch contains roughly 0.75 - 1.2 oz of tea (depending on the weight and bulkiness of the tea). 

Each box contains enough tea to make about 30-40 cups of tea, depending on the types of tea and how strong you like it.

You can also steep most of these teas more than once, so realistically you could stretch it to 40-50 cups of tea. 

Many of our teas are USDA Certified Organic when we buy them from our suppliers. However, we cannot label them as USDA Certified Organic unless each tea is individually certified for Tea Runners. 

At any given time we have 300-400 teas on our roster, and we're constantly adding new ones and dropping others.

We offer up to 25-30 different teas a month and organic certification approval for each tea can take months, so it doesn't fit very easily with our tight deadlines for packaging and production. 

In short, most our teas are organic but our business model makes it very hard to get the certification on our label. 

We also manage to get our hands on top quality Chinese teas that were never intended for the US market and, therefore, never bother with USDA certification. 

n general, tea that is properly stored has a long shelf life. Some teas are definitely better when freshest, however others may taste better with age (black teas in particular).

We put best by dates on our packaging for each tea.

In general, pure teas usually have a shelf life of 2-3 years. Blended teas (depending on the ingredients) are also usually good for 2 years. Flavored teas have a little less shelf life, but in general they will be good for up to 1 year.

Make sure to store your teas in a cool, dark, dry place for best shelf life. Properly stored teas will be good for a very long time.

Because we have so many teas (300+), we only warehouse them all in the United States. We do not warehouse all these teas in Canada as well.

You can purchase full-sized bags of tea anytime from our American website at tearunners.com

  • We offer preferential exchange rates to Canadian customers.
  • Shipping from the U.S. to Canada, in most cases, is very similar in price to shipping from within Canada.

Duty
Orders to Canada purchased on tearunners.com will likely be charged duty when received in Canada. We provide estimates of the duty charges on checkout.

Every month or so, we offer our entire U.S. inventory to Canadians on this website, tearunners.ca, so that you can place your orders without being charged duty. We import all the orders manually and ship them via Canada Post.

Make sure you're on our mailing list to be notified of these Duty-Free sales!

Shipping

The following information applies only to subscription boxes shipping to Canadian addresses.

Our subscription boxes ship for FREE via Canada Post Lettermail. In most cases, our boxes are small enough to fit through a mail slot, and they will fit easily in your community mailbox.

All boxes are shipped from Vancouver, BC and can take 8-14 days to arrive anywhere in Canada.

Unfortunately, Canada Post Lettermail does not come with tracking.

Free Shipping is only possible because Lettermail affordable. If we shipped via tracked parcels, shipping would cost an average of $20 per box.

Our subscription boxes are custom designed to fit within the specifications for Lettermail.

Please note, if you're shipping to the USA you should be ordering from www.tearunners.com (not .ca)

Shipping is FREE to all United States addresses (including overseas military addresses) for our subscription boxes. We use USPS Ground Advantage and your box should arrive within 3-5 days once scanned by USPS.  You will received a tracking link via email.