Conversations Unplugged
with Josephine Musco
Josephine Musco looked at something billions of people use every day and saw a problem hiding in plain sight: the tea bag. Concerned about plastic components in tea bags coming into contact with boiling water, she set out to preserve the convenience of a traditional tea bag without using the bag at all. The result was Olyxir, a completely dissolvable tea strip made from plant material. In this conversation with STEMREGEN Founder and Chief Science Officer Christian Drapeau, Josephine demonstrates how the technology works and explains why rethinking something as simple as a cup of tea became her mission.
Josephine Musco
Instead of placing loose tea inside a bag, Olyxir transforms the plant ingredients themselves into a thin strip. Josephine demonstrates one made from butterfly pea flower, held together with plant cellulose and designed to dissolve directly into water. There is no bag to steep or remove afterward. Drop the strip into water, stir, and the entire thing becomes the drink. As Christian puts it after seeing the strip firsthand, “the strip is the plant, just reorganized.”
Josephine has taken that format far beyond a single tea. The line includes blends featuring ingredients such as guaraná, yerba mate, lemon balm, ginger, olive leaf, green tea, and cordyceps mushrooms, along with options designed around sleep and electrolytes. Her butterfly pea flower strip even changes color when lemon is added as the pH changes. For Christian, who immediately begins suggesting other plants that could potentially work in the format, the simplicity of the idea is what makes it so compelling: familiar ingredients delivered in an entirely different way.
Olyxir first launched in 2016, on a day Josephine remembers easily because she was in the hospital delivering her daughter when she received the email that the first shipment had reached store shelves. Nearly a decade later, the idea still earns the same reaction when Christian sees it dissolve for the first time: “It’s ingenious.” By removing the traditional tea bag and turning the tea itself into the delivery system, Josephine has taken one of the world’s oldest daily rituals and given it a surprisingly modern redesign.
