We had so much fun when we toured the Celestial Seasonings processing plant in Boulder, Colorado! It’s a free 45-minute tour that starts in a lobby where you can sample some teas, buy drinks, and enjoy prints of artwork from the various tea boxes. There is a 15-minute intro film, followed by a 30-minute walking tour. The following is a travelogue of our visit some years ago.
At the end of the film, hair nets are distributed and are a mandatory requirement, no matter how bad you look in one. For men with facial hair, there are “beard nets” – also mandatory. After all, no one wants hair in their tea! Our guide tells us the company has several hundred employees, but we don’t see that many, since the plant is largely automated, with machines designed especially for Celestial Seasonings.
Our first stop is the room where the tea is cleaned and cut. A giant covered box shakes the plant pieces to loosen any dirt, while giant blowers work to remove more dirt, for an effective “dry cleaning.” Ingredients are stored whole, and cut as needed, to ensure the most flavorful product. The guide passes around bowls of the whole plant and the cut product, so we can see the difference. We move on, past 2-storey stacks of pallets piled high with bags of product. Ingredients are obtained from around the globe, some from farms that have been in partnership with Celestial Seasonings since their humble beginnings in 1969.
Next we visit the “Tea Room”, a section of the factory where all the different leaves are stored. The rooms each have charming signs, reminiscent of Willy Wonka’s factory. The tea leaves – for black, green or white tea – are all stored separately, so as to not absorb the smells and flavors of other plants which, apparently, they do easily.
Our next stop is the “Mint Room”, where bags of spearmint and peppermint leaves are kept. This room is kept closed off and well-sealed because, as the guide explains, mints are the “bully plants” – their smell overpowers any other plant. Our guide invites us to step into this room, which we do. Immediately we are – assaulted is the only word I can think of to describe the smell! Think mentholated cough drops – times 1000! My eyes water and I find I’m reluctant to inhale. I tell the guide it’s like “being assaulted by candy canes” and she laughs. She tells us we are welcome to step outside if we need to. I gladly exit, joining a pregnant woman who never entered at all. Now I understand the mugs in the gift shop that proclaim, “I survived the Mint Room!” by the end of the guide’s talk on that room, no one was still in the room except the guide, who claimed she liked the smell. I noted even her eyes were watering by the end of that portion of the tour!
With the door to the Mint Room securely closed, we move on to view the pallet-stacking machine and its accompanying wrapping machine, that shrouds the completely stacked pallets in plastic from a giant roll. We walk around the outer perimeter of the production floor, watching the packaging process in fascination. One machine measures and bags the tea, another tucks the bags into their boxes, and a third closes the inner wrapper and the outer box lid. The boxes then proceed along the conveyor belt where yet another machine packs the boxes into cases.
The tour exits the factory into the gift shop, where you can stock up on all your favorite Celestial Seasonings tea, many that I have a hard time finding at local stores. There are also numerous mugs, teapots and other gifts, including prints of the artwork that graces the Celestial Seasonings tea boxes. There is an adjoining café where we stopped for a tasty lunch. All together, it was a lovely, Mostly free way to spend the day!
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