Wagh Bakri Tea Group

Wagh Bakri traces to 1892, when Narandas Desai first owned a tea estate in Durban, South Africa. Racial prejudice pushed him to leave, and by 1919, back in India and carrying a letter of recommendation from Mahatma Gandhi praising his integrity and skill in the tea trade, he used it to found the Gujarat Tea Depot Co. in Ahmedabad, aiming to bring quality tea blends to India's working class, particularly the city's textile mill workers who had little access to it before.

The brand name Wagh Bakri — tiger and goat — was registered in 1934, paired with a logo showing the two animals sharing a teacup. The image was chosen deliberately: it represented social harmony and the breaking down of caste and class divisions, a message built directly into the company's branding rather than added as marketing after the fact.

More than a century after Desai founded the Gujarat Tea Depot Co., Wagh Bakri remains headquartered in Ahmedabad and privately run by his descendants, one of India's oldest continuously operating tea houses. Its founding story — a South African tea estate, a Gandhi reference letter, and a logo built around social equality — is unusually well documented for a company of its age.