junkyvast.blogg.se

“I wanted spiritual adventure, and I was on the ride of my life.

“I had wanted bold I found bold,” he wrote. In You’ve GOT to Read This Book! 55 People Tell the Story of the Book That Changed Their Life, Siegel discloses that the ideals he gathered from The Urantia Book guided how he ran Celestial Seasonings from the beginning and provided a moral compass for himself and his employees. In fact, the religious text is responsible for much more than the name of the company. In no time the friends were sauntering into the local bank to get a loan for their new business, “wearing jeans, smelling of herbs, and armed with Tupperware containers of Mo’s 36 and Sleepytime blends.” They called their company Celestial Seasonings, after co-founder Lucinda Ziesing’s flowername.īut there might be another reason they named it “celestial.” Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believers in a new-age bible called The Urantia Book, which followers call “an epochal revelation authored solely by celestial beings.” The book touches upon everything from mind control to a eugenics plot to eliminate the “inferior races” of our great nation. On those first hikes, the team harvested enough herbs for 500 pounds of a blend they called Mo’s 36 Herb Tea, and the sleep-conjuring tea made of chamomile, spearmint, and other herbs soon followed. The group wanted to get into the business.

The concept that “tea” could be herbal was innovative in itself, since up until then, all tea in America and Great Britain was made of the plant Camellia sinensis. One of the friends, Mo Siegel, was serving an Asian herbal tea to customers in a local shop to much success in 1969. This article by Megan Giller originally appeared on Van Winkles, the publication devoted to sleep.īefore Sleepytime became the crown jewel of Celestial Seasonings, with 1.6 billion cups sold per year, before the company became the largest tea manufacturer in North America, the tea was nothing more than a dream in the heads of a few flowerchildren hiking up the Rocky Mountains in search of herbs.