celestial seasonings sleepytime tea safeway

Celestial seasonings sleepytime tea safeway full#

A year later they went up to $300,000, and the next year $1 million. I would still plant my apple tree') and Churchilland Shakespeare, and sent them out into the world.

They put them (by hand) into colorfully designed boxes franked with quotations from Albert Eistein and Martin Luther ('Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to peices. But the big coup was the 12 blends they created, with names like Red Zinger and Sleepytime and Lemon Mist and Pelican Punch. They collected herbs - 90 in all - from around the world: tilia flowers, skullcap petals, Chinese star anise, eucalptus leaves, bergamot oil, passion flowers, lemon grass and the like.įorty of these they packaged individually in tea bags as simple herbal teas. They envisioned a great dried-fruit business that might net them a fortune, but the deal fell through.Īnd so they headed for the herbs in the hills, and when their initial sachels of herbs sold so well, they stepped up their pace. The two met out West and heard about an old orchard that was begging for an owner. Hay was essentially a rich kid from Long Island who had gone into the Marines and Knew that the military was not his life's calling, Siegel had grown up in the Rockies and was picking herbs as a boy. Drinking herbal tea - which, for the most part, contains no caffeine, and thus is touted by health food fanciers - invariably meant buying a pound of rose hips from the druggist and steeping it in hot water. Most of the $600 million Americans were spending annually on tea was for black tea, the fermented leaves of a small evergreen tree found in India and China. Until Celestial Seasonings was incorporated in 1972, no American tea company offered herbal tea blends. This year Hay and Siegel expect their Celestial Seasoning herbal tea company in Boulder, Colo., with its 250 employees to gross $10 million. In a few months, they had $10,000 to tide them over his winter. And then the four loaded the works into an old VW bus and started hitting every place in Colorado they could think of, selling the little packets for $1 each. The two women sewed together 10,000 muslin bags. More immediately, they and their wives had to make it through the winter. The two of them were picking wild herbs and pipe-dreaming about getting rich.

Celestial seasonings sleepytime tea safeway full#

Way back in the early 1970s, when his hair was halfway down his back and his beard was full and the business degree from Adelphi was fresh in his pocket, New Yorker John Hay was roaming the Rockies with a friend named Mo Siegel.