Celestial Seasonings
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Celestial Seasonings - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)
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Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory – Boulder
Serving 1.6 billion cups of tea per year, Celestial Seasonings is North America’s biggest manufacturer of herbal teas. Their tea factory is located in the Gunbarrel neighborhood of Northeast Boulder. The company, established more than 40 years ago, has only one mission:
to provide delicious, high-quality teas that are good for their customers and good for the world.
Celestial Seasonings is a world-famous tea factory, with free factory tours throughout the year. The Tea Shop has every flavor of tea they make, plus plenty of Celestial swag. On-site dining is available for breakfast and lunch at the Celestial Cafe. Enjoy light, nutritious home-cooked meals.
Natural Tea produced in Boulder
The iconic Sleepytime Tea Bear had very humble beginnings. Back in 1969, a visionary group of herb-knowledgeable entrepreneurs started blending natural herbs in a small Boulder barn. Like-minded people Mo Siegel, John Hay, Peggy Clute, and a few more others, started gathering herbs in the Boulder mountains to make their very first blend of tea.
It was also in the succeeding years that the herbal tea category was defined when they started selling herbal teas in hand-sewn muslin bags. The company’s name was inspired by one of its co-founders, named Lucinda Ziesings. All their ingredients were sourced from the area’s forests and fields.
This calming blend of hand-harvested chamomile, spearmint, and lemongrass was sold in 1969 through local health food stores. Today it boasts its own Wellness line of eight different Sleepytime varieties.
Helping the Whole World Unwind!
The idealistic founders of Celestial Seasonings were determined to find success, but not at the expense of peaceful and harmonious coexistence with the planet. Forty-five years later, the singular shared vision sustains one of the largest specialty tea manufacturers in North America, serving 1.6 billion-plus cups of tea annually, crafted from more than 100 different ingredients from over 35 countries.
Factory Tours on Sleepytime Drive
Celestial Seasonings offers free 45-minute factory tours that run every hour and comprise of a short video introduction and a 30-minute long walking tour throughout the factory. Complimentary guided tours take you into the working factory, multiple times every day. Every visitor gets the chance to see the behind-the-scenes, everything from making teas to packaging them.
Go on the weekdays to view the factory while the workers are busiest. If you catch it on a weekday you’ll see the factory in operation, blending, packaging, and shipping products. Tours are first-come, first-served for walk-in guests with reservations required for any non-family group of 8 or more.
See how everything comes together, from fresh ingredients to finished tea. Children 5 and up are allowed to tour the factory. All ages are welcome in the Tour Center.
All teas are available for tasting at the sampling bar and visitors are always welcome to stop in and try new blends without touring the facility. While on the property, enjoy a meal and some great art at the Celestial Café, open for breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday.
Other onsite attractions such as their Mint Room, Celestial Herb Garden, and Tea Shop are also open for daily tours. The Celestial Café, located in East Boulder’s Gunbarrel neighborhood, offers hearty breakfast and lunch meals and many beautiful works of art.
Specialty Seasonings – Popular Products
Aside from the USA and Canada, their teas are sold in many countries via their international distributors.
Furthermore, the flavors can be floral, fruity, minty, rich & earthy, spicy, or sweet. Their teas are sold in various forms, like bag, bottled, concentrate, and k-cup, while also being marketed to satisfy different moods:
- Feel Better
- Treat Yourself
2014 brought the launch of Organic, Fair Trade Certified™ Estate Teas sold exclusively at Whole Foods Market®. Hand-selected tea leaves are sourced from some of the world’s finest tea gardens in Rwanda, China, and India.
Celestial Sustainability
Blending for a purpose, the Celestial Seasonings also gives back to the community by helping different charities and organizations based in Colorado, as well as around the world. Corporate social responsibility remains the foundational core of the Celestial Seasonings mission:
Doing business the right way by combining high-quality, sustainably produced products with responsible global citizenship.
These ideals are evidenced in the natural fiber, biodegradable, compostable, chlorine-free tea bags that deliberately lack strings, tags, staples, and individual wrappers. Tea boxes use 100% recycled paperboard, including 35% post-consumer waste.
The company’s botanicals purchasers deal directly with the farmers and communities that grow the products, allowing for the highest-quality ingredients while simultaneously providing economic benefits that remain within the communities. Many of the farming partners have supplied Celestial Seasonings for decades, operating in accordance with sustainable agricultural practices.
The Artist Behind the Box Art
We think our boxes are just as important as the goodness they hold, so we’ve always created beautiful packaging adorned with commissioned works of art and thoughtful, inspiring words.
If you have always wondered whom to thank for the beautiful eye candy featured on the vibrant tea boxes all these years, much of the gratitude goes to artist Jerry LoFaro. From his enduring relationship with Celestial Seasonings Tea, LoFaro created images for over 50 tea boxes, products, and tins .
Now that the holidays are nearly over for another year, put on the new slippers, snuggle in, and soothe your overworked nerves with Boulder’s most beloved sleepy bear.
Address: 4600 Sleepytime Dr, Boulder , CO 80301
Phone: 303-581-1202
Season: Year-round
Website: celestialseasonings.com
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Celestial Seasonings Restarts its Popular Tea Tour, Reopens Tea Shop in Boulder, Colo.
Celestial Seasonings , based in Boulder, Colo., had a grand reopening of its campus to visitors and tea enthusiasts for its popular tea tour. The tea tour officially resumed on Aug. 12, along with the reopening of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Shop on the property.
Coinciding with the 13th Annual Celestial Seasonings B Strong Ride , benefiting the Boulder Community Health Center for Integrative Care and other local cancer charities, the tea tour resumed as 700 cyclists started and finished their ride on the grounds of Celestial Seasonings headquarters.
Celestial Seasonings’ Newly Designed Facility
The newly designed Celestial Seasonings facility greeted visitors with captivating visuals and engaging displays that showcase the passion and innovation behind the tea-making process.
In fact, the 45-minute tea tour has been re-imagined as a multi-sensory experience that includes a walk through an art gallery that features more than 50 years of tea box art; complimentary tea samples at a tea bar with more than 90 tea varieties; and an up-close view of the factory, where eight million tea bags are produced daily.
"We are so pleased to welcome visitors back to our campus," said Tim Collins, general manager of Celestial Seasonings. “Whether you are a long-time fan or new to tea, we invite you to Celestial Seasonings. We like to say our teas are a little bit of magic in your mug.”
Guests on the tour also get an exclusive look – and get to experience the exhilarating scent – of the famous Mint Room, which has led many guests to exclaim, “I survived the Mint Room!” In addition, the tour features the Sleepytime Bear Cottage, a recreation of the Celestial Seasonings box artwork, offering a fun photo opp.
Fun Facts About Celestial Seasonings and Its Tea Tour:
- Historically, more than 140,000 visitors come through the Celestial Seasonings Tour Center each year, with about 2.1 million visits total.
- When running at full capacity, 500,000 boxes of teas are manufactured at the Celestial Seasonings Boulder, Colo. plant each day (around 10,000,000 tea bags).
- The top three Celestial Seasonings teas are Sleepytime, Chamomile and Peppermint.
- Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime brand tea is the No. 1 sleep tea (per Circana, MULO+C, latest 52 week data ending 7/30/23).
- Celestial Seasonings sources ingredients for its teas from 40 different countries and 10 U.S. states, with 70 percent of ingredients purchased directly from farmers and local communities.
- The Celestial Seasoning boxes are made with 100-percent recycled paperboard (including 35 percent consumer waste), and the company will soon be eliminating the plastic overwrap on the tea boxes. That will save around 160,000 pounds of plastic waste a year.
- Celestial Seasonings tea offerings currently feature stringless, tagless, stapleless and individual wrapper free tea bags – saving 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year (calculation of the weight of string plus tag multiplied by the total number of teabags made).
- Unique to Celestial Seasonings is its iconic custom art commissioned for its boxes.
- Celestial Seasonings exports its teas to around 35 countries.
- 1.6 billion cups of Celestial Seasonings tea are served globally each year.
- Celestial Seasonings is America's first herbal tea company. In 1969, its first tea was created from herbs and botanicals foraged in the forests of the Rocky Mountains.
Celebrating 50 Years
Celestial Seasonings, Inc. (a subsidiary of The Hain Celestial Group ) has been creating teas for more than 50 years, and the brand currently offers more than 90 varieties of herbal, green, black, wellness, rooibos and chai teas. Each blend is crafted by the company’s blendmaster – all from the finest herbs, teas, spices and botanicals.
For more information on Celestial Seasonings, the tea tour or the tea shop, visit CelestialSeasonings.com .
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Plan to Attend or Participate in World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024
To learn about other key developments, trends, issues, hot topics and products within the global tea community, plan to attend World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024 in Las Vegas, co-located with Bar & Restaurant Expo . Visit WorldTeaExpo.com .
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