'Tea Tree' Oils & Honey Venture Projects Billion Dollar Industry

Tribal Therapeuticals Ltd of Northland is preparing to launch a “tea tree” essential oil and honey venture that it believes can generate NZD270m in export revenues over a 10-year period. The US state of California is identified as the primary export market and the directors believe the venture can blossom into a billion-dollar industry. Financing via private placement and crowdfunding is envisaged. Australian interests appear to anchor the venture.

By Bruce Roscoe

This Māori-centric plant venture was seeded in Australia. The Tribal Beat, a Tribal Therapeuticals newsletter, records in its NZ Summer/US Winter 2025-26 issue that company directors began doing business in 1991 with Linda Brink, who then was trading in Australian tea tree products.

This graphic, which appears on the landing page of the Tribal Therapeuticals website, conjures a colonial, romanticised image of handsome, innocent, indigenous people redolent of the quintessential “noble savage” of European literature dating to the 1600s. Tattooed, in traditional Māori attire, the female and male each hold a sapling of a native tree, silhouetted against a laboratory scene. At upper left, a deer skull is added to gothic effect, even though deer were introduced into New Zealand in the mid-1850s and later than the European honeybee. At centre, the “Mānuka Oil for Her” and ”Kānuka Oil for Him” products, which are “rooted in Māori ethnobotanical wisdom” characterise the gender separation that is a hallmark of Tribal Therapeuticals marketing. The oils are steam-distilled from plant branches and leaves.

Fast forward to 2026. Brink is Florida, US-based and president of the US-registered Tribal Therapeutical Corp. She has written an “open letter to all Te Tai Tokerau”, which is pretty much everyone who lives north of west Auckland through to Cape Reinga.

Brink’s letter is published on the website of Tribal Therapeuticals, tribalteatree.com, the Kerikeri-registered company whose directors include Aaron Pollack, managing director of Golden Grove Naturals, which describes itself as the “leading Australian producer of native, natural essential oils”.

In 4,133 words, the letter notes plans for successive capital raises of NZD500,000, NZD1m, and NZD2m in the form of a private placement followed by crowdfunding in New Zealand, if my reading of the machine-like document is correct. The Tribal Beat adds a USD5m crowdfunding plan but both sources seem too convoluted for clarity to this writer.

Harnessing Aboriginal Heritage

Products from initial production runs will be exported to Australian-owned premises in California, Brink reveals in her LinkedIn account.

“I'm really pleased to have this US rollout supported by an old Australian tea tree oil industry friend and business associate through his family-owned natural healthcare distribution facility that has operated in CA since 2013,” Brink writes.

According to The Tribal Beat, plans are afoot to combine mānuka and kānuka oils with Australian tea tree oil in a “Down Under Home Healthcare Pack”. Mānuka is for her, kānuka is for him, and the tea tree oil is for home. “We put it to (our Australian partners) that aboriginal use of the…tea tree dates back more than 30,000 years…What a fantastic ancient story”, the newsletter item enthuses.

(Via emails, Tribal Therapeuticals directors have walked back the proposed Australian cooperation but no response from either Pollack or Brink has been received to requests for confirmation of Australian content in published materials.)    

Welcome to the Machine

Tribal Therapeuticals makes a sweeping use of artificial intelligence (AI) — from website text, graphics, to presentations and reports in downloadable PDF files. The 15 files I accessed — there are more but one does not live forever — contain 63,767 words and all read as AI productions.

This AI usage is unabashed “We regard AI as a research, modelling and drafting tool, much as previous generations utilized libraries, databases, spreadsheets and search engines”, a Tribal Therapeuticals director (or AI) said in an email.

AI struggles with some facts of apiculture and its industry. For example, methylglyoxal is “found in the honey extracted from the mānuka flower pollen” (pollen is confused with nectar). Settlers Honey is among examples of “collapse or distress” (liquidation proceedings against that company were rescinded soon after they were begun in 2025).

AI projects a vision of Tribal Therapeuticals that appears to masquerade as a present incarnation where, for example, the company is a licensee of the UMF Honey Association and a unit of its operations is listed on the Labuan Financial Exchange of Malaysia. Trademarks stated as “registered” such as “whole-of-plant” and “Life-Force from Nature” similarly appear futuristic.   

Typical AI text structure — “This is not that. This is something else.” — ironically repeats throughout the documents, as in “This is not a concept-stage venture. It is now progressing execution-stage”.

This export and US retail revenue projection is printed in Tribal Therapeuticals document no. 6055 (p 5) and published on the company’s website on the Biomass page. The “POI” in “POI Honey” abbreviates “plant oil infused”. https://tribalteatree.com/biomass

In the above table, data for “Oils” refers to NZ export and US retail values for mānuka and kānuka essential oils. “Honey” refers to mānuka and kānuka honey infused with their respective plant oils. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for both the export value of the oils and their US retail value is the same at 36.4% and for the honeys the same at 36.4%. Those are the growth rates that, on average each year, are needed to achieve the Year 10 values. The margin percentage is calculated by dividing the export values by the retail values and multiplying the sum by 100. The margin data are presented only to show that Tribal Therapeuticals believes that trading in the oils can be 3.7 times (33.1 divided by 9.1) more profitable than trading in the honeys. (In actual trading, wholesalers and retailers would calculate profit margin by dividing their costs total by their sales total.) It is unclear how Tribal Therapeuticals arrives at a value exceeding 1 billion NZ dollars in its 10-year projection (unless it is counting some share of US retail value, which belongs to a different industry to that of primary production and manufacturing in NZ). A billion dollars is more than double the NZD480m recorded for total NZ honey exports in calendar 2025. All table calculations by the report author. 

Infrastructure Wanting

Official and commercial support infrastructure for mānuka oil is underdeveloped compared to that for honey. As though transplanted from a United Kingdom database, export codes for the essential oils of orange, lemon, lime, citrus fruits, geranium, and jasmine are maintained by New Zealand Customs under subcodes of 3301. No code can be found for mānuka oil. Exporters must use an “n.e.c.” (“not elsewhere classified”) code.

Samples must be sent to an Australian laboratory for analysis as no New Zealand laboratories have found the volume demand sufficient to establish and equip an analysis service.

Because export data are unpublished, the scale of the mānuka oil industry is hard to gauge. Honey packing and dedicated oils ventures (the essential oil and personal care and cosmetics products that contain it) by and large have failed to gain traction in the sector. 

“Ancient Natives”

A colonial tone jars Tribal Therapeuticals materials. “Tea tree” is imprecise and belongs to the lexicon of like terms such as honeysuckle (rewarewa) and Christmas tree (pohutukawa). Putting mānuka and kānuka oils in a “tea tree” tent invites confusion with Australian tea tree oil, which is produced from plantations of Melaleuca alternifolia trees, whose genus is separate from that of mānuka. (In Japan, among other markets, Australian tea tree oil retail prices are 10-30% lower than those for mānuka oil.)

Same-tent housing also flies in the face of continuing and costly efforts to secure indigenous intellectual property rights for the word ‘mānuka’ which, if successful, should benefit all industry participants.

Website text such as the “ancient natives of New Zealand…” amplifies the colonial cadence. An undercurrent of political activism also raises its head. One website passage reads: “…the flow-on effect of freeing 750,000 natives from the restraints of wealth inhibiting land laws…”

One Day

The Tribal Therapeuticals venture has been brewing under more than one name for some 10 years. The company is reluctant to state in which year “Year 1” begins in the 10-year revenue projection. The greatest challenge to the launch may be finding investors who have the patience to follow the machine.

Bruce Roscoe is a Japan-resident researcher and former foreign correspondent and securities analyst.