Golestan

Golestan began in 1950 as a tea trading house founded by Seyed Mohammad Gerami, formally incorporated as a joint stock company under the Golestan name on November 22, 1961. More than seventy years later it is one of Iran's largest food companies, headquartered in Tehran, but tea remains the business it was built on and the category still most associated with the Golestan name across Iranian households.

The company sources its tea directly from estates in Assam and Darjeeling, India, tying an Iranian household staple to specific South Asian tea-growing regions rather than anonymous bulk imports. Golestan has since expanded well past tea into rice, spices, pistachios, and dozens of other food categories — 20 main product groups and hundreds of individual items by its own count — but the tea trading house Gerami started in 1950 is the origin point the rest of the business grew from.

For a company now selling everything from saffron to lentils, Golestan's tea remains its oldest and most identity-defining product line: a Tehran-headquartered import house that has spent seven decades bringing Assam and Darjeeling tea to Iranian tables.