Simon Lévelt

Simon Lévelt traces back to 1826, when the merchant it's named for opened a small shop in Amsterdam's old harbor selling coffee and tea brought in from distant trading routes — two centuries of continuous operation, now in its sixth generation of family involvement. The company has since centered its production in Haarlem, where it roasts coffee and packs tea, and employs a certified Q-grader on staff to evaluate quality to an internationally standardized protocol.

Today Simon Lévelt carries more than 150 tea varieties alongside some 25 coffees, sold through a network of 40 specialty stores across the Netherlands and Belgium as well as online, with same-day shipping for weekday orders placed before noon. Running coffee and tea as parallel, equally serious specialties — rather than treating one as the other's sideline — is a structure that traces directly back to the original 1826 harbor shop, which sold both from the start.

For a Dutch merchant house old enough to predate most of the countries it now sources tea from, the 40-store footprint across two countries is the modern scale of a business that has never stopped being, at its core, one small harborside shop's original two-product idea.