Tea in North America
North America grows only a small amount of tea, but it has shaped how much of the world drinks it: from the accidental invention of the tea bag to a modern specialty tea movement that treats leaf tea with the same seriousness as specialty coffee.
The United States: iced tea and the tea bag
Iced tea is the drink most associated with American tea culture, particularly in the South, where sweet tea is a daily staple. Its popularity is often traced to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, where a hot summer reportedly pushed a tea vendor to serve his tea over ice: though iced tea recipes existed in American cookbooks before that. The tea bag is also often credited to an American: New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan, who around 1908 is said to have shipped tea samples in small silk bags, which customers then brewed bag and all, unintentionally popularising a format that changed how most of the world drinks tea day to day.
More recently, the U.S. has developed a genuine specialty tea scene: small importers, tea rooms and single-origin retailers treating tea with the same origin-focused, quality-first approach that transformed coffee, alongside a large mainstream market still dominated by iced and bagged tea.
Where tea is actually grown
Commercial tea farming in North America is small but real. South Carolina is home to some of the oldest continuously operating tea plantations in the United States, in the Charleston area, dating back to experiments with tea cultivation in the late 19th century. Hawaii's volcanic soil and climate have also supported a small but growing number of specialty tea farms in recent decades, producing limited quantities of high-quality leaf.
Canada and Mexico
Canada grows essentially no tea commercially but has a strong tea-drinking and importing culture, particularly in cities with large South Asian, East Asian and Caribbean communities who maintain their home countries' tea traditions. Mexico's tea culture leans more toward herbal infusions rooted in Indigenous plant knowledge (such as manzanilla (chamomile) and yerba buena (mint)) alongside a smaller but growing specialty black and green tea market.