Celestial Seasonings Tea: All Natural After 40 Years

Celestial Seasonings celebrated its 40th anniversary last week. They made it a zero-waste event, served up local food, local beer, and of course, a bunch of the teas for which they've become famous.

During the festivities, I sat down in the Celestial Seasonings tasting room with Kay Wright, the botanicals purchaser for the company for over 30 years. I asked about some of the relationships they have cultivated with farmers around the world over the years and how they maintain the quality of their products. Here are the highlights of that conversation.

Planet Green: How do you develop relationships with the farmers you work with?

Kay Wright: When we got large enough to go overseas, we decided to go to source whenever possible. Now we're buying from over 30 different countries and I've been dealing with most of my suppliers, especially with the larger items, for over 30 years.

Sometimes we go into contract, where we say, "we will give you five years of fair market value if it passes our tasting specifications—if you re-clean it, if you dry it on cement rather than dirt, use new packaging." And with the contract, we buy so much tonnage per year, they can take that to the bank and get a loan.

What is the average size of the operations you work with?

Sometimes we work with cooperatives. Like with the hibiscus, I meet the village elder, the leader there, the party member, and they have to work in conjunction with the farmers, and everybody has an agreement: this is the time we're going to go out and harvest. So they all kind of work together. And now, with everybody having a cell phone, they know what the market price is, so they're very independent, and they know what's going on.

We buy chamomile out of Egypt and out of Mexico. I deal with the son in Egypt. In China, with hibiscus, I dealt with the uncle and then his nephew and then his son. And now the rosehips in Chile, I started out with the father and now I'm dealing with his son.

It stays in families because it's kind of an apprentice-type job, and people hold onto their knowledge: "Well you might know what happened five years ago, but you should see what happened 7 years ago," and so they keep that under their vest.

Do you source any products from the U.S.?

We buy our citrus peel out of California. We get most of our peppermint and spearmint from Washington and Oregon state—the best mint in the world is in Washington and Oregon. The last couple years, a lot of the farms have said, "we're going to do corn, we're going to do biofuel, unless you pay this amount." So sometimes we say yes, we'll do a contract.

We were instrumental in going up to Washington and Oregon state and talking to those farmers into saving some of their mint for leaf rather than putting it into the oil industry, where they just press it there in the field, for the cake and confectionary industry.

And the herbal market in the U.S., we were founding members of the American Botanical Council, the American Herbal Products Association, and their research foundation. If you're wildcrafting, you want to have sustainability. You don't want it overharvested. You want to have it every year.

I've heard even your non-organic teas are tested for pesticides. Is that true?

Everything I buy, once it passes the test for taste reference, then it goes for dirt, oil, herbicides, pesticides, heavy metals, aflatoxins, salmonella, E. coli... once it passes our entire list, I get to bring the container in and then we'll take 5 to 10 sub-samples out of the container and test it all again. So we know it's clean, but we don't pay the extra money to have an outside paper trail or an outside entity come in and check it, because a lot of it is proprietary. We do pride ourselves all the time on being very natural. It's company standards—not industry standards. We test absolutely everything, and not very many companies do that extensive testing.

We reject a lot, because you can even get an organic in here and it will fail pesticides—because you've got drift, etc. It's a mess out there, so we test all the finished product.

What happens when you have to reject a product?

We like to work with the supplier. We had a problem once with some stuff that was tainted with Chernobyl from eastern Europe. We got it here and said this isn't going to work. They didn't know, and people can't take back on something like that, so that's why we work partnerships with them. I said, "Ok, we'll work with you on this. With the next 10 invoices, we'll take off a little at a time. If there's something else you think you can sell me to make up for the loss, that's fine."

We always try to work with the supplier, because it's a gamble. My grandfather was a farmer and he used to say, the funnest way to lose your money is wine and women, the fastest is gambling, and the surest is agriculture.

The Takeaway: Greening Your Tea—Celestial Seasonings Leads By Example

Look for teas made with sustainably harvested ingredients. Usually, if a company makes a point to use good environmental practices, they'll tell you so on their label. If not, there's always a customer service number. Call and find out—if they have no policies on sustainability, you can let them know you won't buy their products until they do.

Find out about their on-site sustainable practices. Up to ten percent of the power consumed at the Celestial Seasonings plant is sourced with wind power, and the company recycles more than 500,000 pounds of materials every year.

Look for teas with minimal packaging. Celestial Seasonings bags its tea without strings, staples, tags or individual wrappers, which the company estimates saves more than 3.5 million pounds of waste from landfills annually. (Of course, even better is to buy loose tea and steep it in a reusable bag or infusion ball.) And Celestial Seasonings tea boxes are made from 100 percent recycled paperboard (35 percent post-consumer waste), and of course can be recycled again when you're done.

And of course, look for fair trade tea or brands demonstrating relationships that benefit small farmers (like with organic, third-party certification isn't necessarily the golden rule), the way Kay Wright has shown Celestial Seasonings has done for more than 30 years.