25/09/2026
A New Chapter for the West Highland Tea Company
As many of you know, we are first and foremost a tea company. Under this banner we have a gift shop, our Tea Studio Café, an online tea business & we supply many businesses across Scotland with our tea. As you can imagine this is quite an undertaking for a small family business to manage. At the end of last year, we realised that we were beginning to outgrow both our current business model and our premises, and that in the long term something would have to change. In July this year, we took the first steps towards a strategic review of the business and how we use our space, time and resources.
We started online in April 2020 and, now in 2026, we have vastly outgrown our current storage and tea manufacturing capacity. We need more space, more storage and, importantly, more time to pack and prepare tea for our growing number of customers and stockists. It is exactly the kind of problem you hope to have as a successful small business, and something we are incredibly grateful for.
Ultimately, our strategic review confirmed that we need to make the difficult decision to rethink how we allocate our space, time and resources.
I started this business packing tea at home because of my passion for tea. At the time, I could never have imagined the strides we would make or how much the business would grow. I am so, so grateful to everyone who has supported me on this journey and shared our passion for tea.
You may already know that we now supply numerous businesses with tea across Scotland, including our own local bakehouse, LSIC and self-catering businesses. We have simply run out of space to accommodate this growth. It is a wonderful complaint to have as a small business, but it does mean that we need to make some changes.
As much as we absolutely love our little café, we now have to focus more of our space on the core of our business: tea manufacturing.
From January 2027, we will therefore be repurposing the Tea Studio space to focus more fully on tea production, as was originally intended.
This means that we will no longer have a sit-in café space. Instead, the Tea Studio will become an important part of our production operation, giving us the space we desperately need to store stock and pack orders for our many stockists and online customers.
On a personal upside, this will hopefully mean that we can have a house again rather than a warehouse!
I am incredibly proud of my little business, but I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge some of the fantastic local businesses and people who helped me along the way.
When I moved back to the area after university, Fiona and Michael Baker at Way Out West gave me the opportunity to work for them. My time there helped shape my retail knowledge, and their encouragement to pursue my tea dream had a huge impact on me. The knowledge and mentoring I gained at Way Out West still underpin so much of what I do in the gift shop today, from how I choose products to how I think about presenting and selling them.
I was also incredibly fortunate to work for the West Highland Hotel and Arisaig Marine. Both were wonderfully supportive places that gave me new skills and experience in hospitality in very different ways, and those experiences form a big part of what helped make the café side of the Tea Studio so successful. I cannot thank them enough for that time and everything I learned.
We are very lucky to have such a fantastic local community, and it has been wonderful to work alongside some of Mallaig’s brilliant local producers, including Mallaig Bakehouse and B’s Wee Bakes, as the Tea Studio Café has grown.
A huge thank you also has to go to all of the wonderful staff who have worked with us over the last three years and helped make the Tea Studio what it is. Our consistent five-star reviews are a testament to them and to the care they have shown our customers. This year, a special thank you also goes to Emma McMinn for her amazing bakes.
And finally, to our local regulars — you know who you are — thank you. We truly appreciate every one of you and are so grateful to you for helping us create our own little community here.
This is not the end of the Tea Studio.
Our plans going forward include creating a smaller walk-in space where you will still be able to shop, pick up a hot drink and, of course, enjoy our amazing homemade gelato.
In the meantime, the Tea Studio will continue to be open five days a week in the run-up to Christmas 2026, although we will be operating reduced winter hours.
Our gift shop in the Morrison Building will, of course, continue trading as usual throughout 2027, so our tea will still be easily available locally — and we very much hope to continue seeing all of your familiar faces.
Thank you, as always, for supporting our little business and for being part of its story. The next chapter looks a little different, but it is an exciting one — and one that allows us to keep growing, producing more tea and supplying more of the customers and businesses who have supported us along the way.
Tea Studio opening hours — October 2026
Friday 2 October — 10:30am–3:30pm
Sunday 4 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Monday 5 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Tuesday 6 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Wednesday 7 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Friday 9 October — 10:30am–3:30pm
Saturday 10 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Sunday 11 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Monday 19 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Tuesday 20 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Thursday 22 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Friday 23 October — 10:30am–3:30pm
Sunday 25 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Monday 26 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Friday 30 October — 10:30am–3:30pm
Saturday 31 October — 11:30am–4:30pm
Early November
Sunday 1 November — 11:30am–4:30pm
Monday 2 November — 11:30am–4:30pm
Tuesday 3 November — 11:30am–4:30pm
(November to follow)
