The Great Tartan Tea Swindle

December 5, 2025·42 min·3 clips

Thomas Robinson was jailed for selling fake Scottish tea to luxury stores like Fortnum & Mason.

1. The Food Programme investigates Thomas Robinson, also known as Tam O'Bran, who was jailed three and a half years for two counts of fraud involving fake Scottish-grown tea sold to Fortnum & Mason and luxury hotels. 2. Host Jager Wise, a brewer and sommelier, conducts the investigation visiting a tea tasting at Pico Tea in Edinburgh, a tea grower's farm, the Food Standards Scotland offices, and the Leafies tea awards at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London. 3. The episode asks how a man with fabricated credentials — no army service, no academic qualifications, no chemistry background — convinced the world's top tea buyers and the media that he was producing the UK's first commercial tea. 4. Robinson sold two categories of fraudulent product: white tea he claimed was grown on his Perthshire Wee Tea Plantation, which was actually cheap bulk tea from a wholesaler, and tea plants he sold to Scottish growers that were imported from Italy and unsuited to Scottish conditions. 5. Stuart Wilson of the Scottish Food Crime Unit began investigating in early 2019, after intelligence surfaced in 2018; he found no evidence supporting any of Robinson's claimed credentials, including army service, chemistry qualifications, or an agronomist background. 6. Tea writer and grower Richard Ross purchased 500 plants from Robinson in late 2015, nurtured them through a Scottish winter, and ultimately harvested no sellable tea — zero grams from his entire investment. 7. Beverley Wainwright, a tea specialist who managed a Sri Lankan tea estate, identified the fraud early: Robinson was claiming to sell tea two years after planting, something she states no grower anywhere in the world achieves. 8. Wainwright also flagged the implausibility of Robinson's Scottish Matcha and Scottish Oolong claims, noting that the latter requires elaborate processing equipment running through the night, none of which was visible at his operation. 9. BBC Radio 4's On Your Farm presenter Kaz Graham interviewed Robinson on his plantation in 2016 and broadcast a credulous segment; in retrospect she said she would have done the same again, because Robinson was also selling to Fortnum & Mason and the Dorchester, which she assumed had verified his credibility. 10. The fraud was partly enabled by Robinson having chosen white tea as his product — a category with no established British reference point, making quality assessment difficult even for experienced buyers. 11. Beverly Wainwright and Aberdeen University Professor David Burslem developed a soil-chemical fingerprinting test — the first of its kind applied to tea — that matched seized Robinson samples to overseas-grown teas, not Scottish soils, providing forensic evidence for the prosecution. 12. Burslem noted the technique could form the basis of a geographic authentication and labelling system for Scottish tea, analogous to the distillery provenance system used in Scotch whisky. 13. A clip from Have I Got News For You satirising the Robinson case was referenced as evidence that the British public treats food fraud as comedy, not as a serious crime. 14. Robinson reportedly made half a million pounds from the fraud, which had been running for approximately a decade before his conviction. 15. At the Leafies tea awards, UK Tea Academy representatives Jen Wood and Finbar Lillis argued that consumer education — not regulation alone — is the only sustainable safeguard, and that the UKTA is building a formal membership structure to help identify legitimate tea professionals. 16. Tea merchant Will Battle cited a statistic that approximately 25% of UK adults believe their English Breakfast tea is grown domestically, identifying this structural ignorance as the underlying condition that made Robinson's fraud viable. 17. The episode features a consistent investigative tone: Wise presses interviewees on responsibility, each of whom deflects partially to another party in what he describes as a 'circle of blame' among buyers, media, and regulators. 18. The pacing alternates between immersive scenes — a blind tea tasting, the hushed Leafies judging room — and direct expert interviews, with archive audio of Robinson himself included for dramatic effect. 19. Listeners interested in food fraud, consumer deception, investigative food journalism, or the British tea industry will find this episode substantive and well-reported. 20. Listeners seeking practical tea-buying guidance or broader coverage of the Scottish food scene may find the focus on this single fraud case too narrow.

As heard by us

A brisk tea-fraud story with tasting-room detail, bruised credibility and a sharp little aftertaste.

The Great Tartan Tea Swindle is a neat, faintly furious food-fraud story about a tea claim that travelled further than it should have. The episode follows how Tam O'Brien, later identified as Thomas Robinson, impressed tea specialists, retailers, hotels and journalists before…

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Why you'd press play

You want a tea fraud story that reached Fortnum & Mason and the Dorchester.

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