Merrill J. Fernando

Merrill Joseph Fernando was born into a Catholic family 6 May 1930 in the village of Pallansena, near Kochchikade, in Negombo, British Ceylon, a village north of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. After beginning at the Pallansena village school, then St Mary's in Negombo, he moved to Colombo, attending Maris Stella College and then St Joseph's College.

He also studied for four years to be a priest, at the St. Aloysius seminary in Borella, but was eventually rejected by the brothers there as a candidate.

He then went to London to train as a tea taster at Mincing Lane. While there, he noticed that tea was being mixed and blended but still marketed as pure Ceylon tea. The tea was bought cheaply, with branding and packaging taking place in Europe and the UK, returning small profits to Sri Lankan tea producers while middlemen (wholesalers and resellers, mainly a few large corporations) reaped the lion's share of the profits.

Fernando started his career in tea when he was just 20 years old as a tea assistant with A. F. Jones and Company, a tea exporting company run by Arthur Frederick Jones and his sons Dennis and Alan Jones, where he was appointed managing director in 1954. In the mid-1950s, the company was in the business of selling tea in bulk to international companies for blending and reselling. Fernando is credited with changing the focus of the company from its Anglocentric market to new markets such as Japan and the USSR. In 1956, when a change in government looked to seize control of some foreign-owned estates, the Jones family left the country, and Fernando acquired their estates via a consortium. In 1962 Fernando established Ceylon Tea Services Company and Merrill J. Fernando Company, which exported loose tea to several countries, including North America and Australasia.

Fernando bought his first few tea estates in the 1970s. After the nationalisation of the plantations in 1971–72, Fernando stepped down to start MJF Exports, and within a few years most Australian retailers sourced their house brands from MJF.

In 1982, Fernando established Ceylon Tea Services Ltd, which became one of the first companies listed as a public company on the Colombo Stock Exchange. In the mid-1980s, he started negotiations with the Australian supermarket retailer Coles, eventually persuading them to stock his tea. He founded Dilmah in 1985, by introducing single-origin tea as competition to blended commodity tea. The tea started with exports to Australia and New Zealand, and in the 1990s to Europe and North America. In 2013, Australia made up 10 percent of Dilmah's global annual retail sales. As of 2016, Dilmah tea was sold in over 100 countries.

Fernando stood down as CEO of Dilmah in 2019 and was succeeded by his son Dilhan Fernando.

Fernando was married and had two sons, Malik and Dilhan, but split from his wife when their sons were four and two years old respectively, and he brought them up as a single parent.

In May 2023, a biography of Fernando was published, entitled The story of Ceylon Teamaker Merrill J. Fernando; Disruptor, Teamaker, Servant, co-written by Anura Gunasekera, and Fernando.

In 2007, Fernando founded Dilmah Conservation, "to incorporate environmental and wildlife conservation efforts into the work of the MJF Foundation, which primarily focuses on social justice". One of its main aims was to protect Sri Lankan forests. The MJF charitable foundation uses 15% of the pre-tax profits of Dilmah and related companies to provide nutritional, educational, and other support to disabled children, the elderly, and youth in marginalised communities. It has also supported Indigenous Indian tribes adjust to the 21st century, and survivors of the 2004 tsunami.