Celestial Seasonings: Wild Herbs and a Hippie Dream That Became a Business

In nineteen sixty-nine, a nineteen-year-old named Mo Siegel was working at a natural food store in Boulder when he had an idea that was, in that moment and that city, almost inevitable. He went into the Rocky Mountain foothills with friends and gathered wild herbs, chamomile, spearmint, lemon grass, dried them, mixed them, and hand-sewed them into muslin bags. He called the result Mo's thirty-six Herb Tea and sold it to local health food stores.

The counterculture of nineteen sixty-nine Boulder had a particular relationship to food and medicine, an inherited skepticism toward the processed and industrial, a preference for the natural and handmade. Siegel's herbal teas fit that sensibility exactly. By nineteen seventy-two, the company had introduced two blends that would define it: Red Zinger and Sleepytime. Sleepytime would become the company's best-selling tea.

The Sleepytime box introduced a second piece of the company's identity: the illustrated packaging. An artist was commissioned in the early nineteen seventies to paint the Sleepytime Bear, a brown bear in a long nightshirt and red cap, dozing in an armchair by a fire. The illustration has barely changed in more than fifty years. It has appeared on a huge number of boxes.

Celestial Seasonings is still headquartered in Boulder and offers free factory tours. The company popularized the American herbal tea market from a starting point that was, quite literally, a group of hikers picking plants in the mountains. That origin story, local and earnest and slightly improbable, fits Boulder perfectly.