Sultan is Morocco’s best-known packaged tea brand, built on a family tea trade that dates back to 1936 and now exporting to roughly 30 countries from a Bouskoura factory the company says is the world’s largest dedicated green tea plant. Sultan doesn’t grow tea in Morocco — like every Moroccan tea brand, it sources leaf abroad — but it has turned blending, packaging and export into a genuine industrial business built around Morocco’s national tea-drinking culture.
At-a-glance
- Family trade founded: 1936, by Hadj Hassan Raji, known as “Moul Atay” (“the tea man”), per Sultan’s own history page
- Sultan brand launched: 1994, by second-generation owner Hamid Raji, following Morocco’s liberalization of the tea import market, per Industrie du Maroc
- Headquarters / factory: Bouskoura, Greater Casablanca
- Production capacity: Around 20,000 tonnes of tea per year, per Industrie du Maroc
- Export footprint: Roughly 29 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Canada, the US and Africa
- Corporate name: Sultan is the flagship brand of MATHEI (La Marocaine des Thés et Infusions), the group’s registered company name, per its SIAL Paris exhibitor listing
What they do
Sultan’s business is blending, packaging and distributing tea rather than growing it — Morocco has no meaningful domestic tea cultivation, so the entire industry, Sultan included, imports leaf (chiefly Chinese green gunpowder tea, the base of Moroccan mint tea) and builds value through blending, quality grading and packaging innovation. The company’s own timeline traces a series of product milestones: new blends introduced in 1958, a star-based quality rating system in 1993, its first flavored-infusion range in 2000, a premium “Moul Ataï” collection in 2008, tea sticks and single-serve capsules in 2013, and its own dedicated factory in 2015 — three years before it says it completed what it describes as the world’s largest green tea processing facility in 2018, per the company’s own account. That “world’s largest” claim is Sultan’s own description of its Bouskoura plant; we found no independent, third-party verification of it, so it should be read as the company’s characterization of its facility rather than a confirmed global ranking.
Today the product range spans loose-leaf green and black teas, bagged formats (sachets, pyramids, pods), and flavored infusions under sub-brands including Sultan Bien-être and Sultan Excellence, alongside its original ceremonial gunpowder-tea lines, according to Sultan’s site. The Sultan brand operates under the corporate name MATHEI (La Marocaine des Thés et Infusions), which trades internationally under the Sultan Tea name — for example, listing itself as such at the SIAL Paris international food trade show, one of the industry’s largest B2B export venues.
Who it’s for
Sultan is relevant to a few distinct audiences beyond everyday Moroccan consumers. Retailers and distributors in the roughly 29 export markets it already serves have an established, mass-market Moroccan brand to carry rather than sourcing directly from anonymous bulk-tea traders. International buyers looking for private-label or contract packaging in food and beverage may find Sultan’s 20,000-tonne annual capacity relevant as a manufacturing partner. And for entrepreneurs studying Morocco’s consumer goods sector, Sultan is a useful case study in how a family trading business scaled into an industrial exporter without ever controlling its raw material supply.
Track record
Sultan has picked up independent recognition alongside its own growth narrative: it was named “Morocco’s Favorite Brand” at the Morocco Awards in 2014 and won a “Product of the Year” distinction in 2020, according to Industrie du Maroc. Its production scale — 20,000 tonnes a year and the ability to run more than 500 distinct product references through the same facility — is a genuine indicator of industrial depth rare among Moroccan consumer brands, and its export reach into 29 countries suggests real distribution infrastructure rather than opportunistic one-off shipments. We did not find independently reported figures for Sultan’s revenue or market share, so we’re not stating any; interested readers should treat the company’s own historical timeline (the 1958-2018 milestones above) as self-reported unless otherwise sourced. What is independently verifiable is the brand’s longevity in a genuinely crowded category: Morocco has dozens of packaged-tea brands competing for the same national mint-tea market, and Sultan’s continuous product evolution — from star-rated quality tiers in 1993 to single-serve capsules two decades later — suggests a company that has kept investing in packaging and format innovation rather than resting on its historical name recognition.
How to connect
Distributors, retailers and prospective partners can reach Sultan through its official site, sultan-tea.com. Moroccopreneur is not affiliated with Sultan or its parent company; this profile is independent editorial coverage.
FAQ
Sources: Sultan Tea (company site), Industrie du Maroc.
