SPILL Tea

Celebrating female-founded brands you'll want to know.

Since November 2025, we've been spotlighting the next generation of female-founded consumer brands and celebrating female entrepreneurship, showing that building a business is a real, viable career path for women from all walks of life, regardless of background, age, culture, or circumstance.

We started Mindful Brand to support women in succeeding in business - not just through what we do, but also in how we shop. We believe in a future where more seven-figure consumer brands are built by women, and we're committed to helping make that vision a reality.

Deciding which businesses to support is a personal choice.

If, like us, you prefer to champion female-owned brands, we hope you enjoy this series.

Today, we’re featuring SPILL, founded by Louise Cheadle & Sofia Buttarazzi in 2024 in the UK.

About the Brand

SPILL is an Everyday tea that tastes bold and pays the farmers more - the Tony's Chocolonely of tea.

It is for people who take a more considered approach to what they buy: the kind of person who's upgraded their regular bread to sourdough, their coffee to speciality, or their loo roll to bamboo.

There's no other Everyday tea quite like it - one that's just won a Great Taste Award, pays farmers 50% more than Fairtrade, and is open about exactly what farmers are paid.

Meet the Founder

Lou is a trained tea taster.

Before SPILL, Lou and Sofia built teapigs from scratch, changing the speciality tea industry in the UK.

Lou always felt there was more to be done in Everyday tea, so after leaving teapigs, they set out to address a part of the market that hadn't been touched for decades.

How She Started

Lou and Sofia started SPILL because the mainstream tea market in the UK has long been dominated by a handful of brands that compete mostly on price. Pushing prices lower and lower has meant the quality of tea drunk in the UK has become, in their words, "meh."

They wanted to improve the taste of tea in the UK, and to improve the transparency of payments to smallholder farmers at origin. They recently returned from another trip to Rwanda, where they made a bonus payment (on top of paying for the tea) - giving farmers the cash equivalent of around two days' work in tea.

What She Learned

Lou has learned to do it yourself.

She and Sofia like to at least have a go at every element of the business - some things they can do, others they can't, but it's much better to try, because then you at least understand what's involved.

Where to shop

SPILL is available to buy at spilltea.co.uk.

Instagram: @spillteacompany

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