Industry Beverage Website Yogi Tea Founded 1984 Number of employees 150 | Products Tea Founder Harbhajan Singh Khalsa CEO Conrad Myers (Apr 2013–) Type of business Private | |
Headquarters Springfield, Oregon, United States Profiles | ||
How to make traditional yogi tea
Yogi Tea is a manufacturer of tea products. Yogi Tea is part of the East West Tea Company, LLC (EWTC)—formerly Golden Temple of Oregon. The company employs about 150 people in the United States and Europe, with offices in Springfield and Portland, Oregon, and in Hamburg, Germany.
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Yogi tea showdown
Origins
Yogi Bhajan, an Indian spiritual teacher who brought the Sikh religion to the West, began teaching Kundalini Yoga in America in 1969. After each yoga class, he served a spiced tea to his students, which they affectionately named "Yogi Tea". The tea was a blend of five traditional Ayurvedic spices: cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, ginger and black pepper. Ayurvedic medicine holds that this combination of spices has unique, healthful properties, so they are still included in many current Yogi Tea formulas.
Commerce
In the 1970s, students of Yogi Bhajan opened Golden Temple Vegetarian Restaurants in the United States, Canada and Europe. Through these restaurants, Yogi Tea was sold to the public, leading to the creation of the Yogi Tea Company in 1984. Over the next couple of years, the business developed a nationwide distribution network, with finely ground spices packaged in teabags in three varieties. In 1988, Yogi Tea's team of herbalists expanded the line to include a number of formulas developed to address specific health needs.
Lawsuits
In 2010, Yogi Tea was sued by Yogi Bhajan's widow Bibiji Inderjit Kaur Puri, and the State of Oregon. The suits alleged that trusted advisers of the Yogi had forged documents relating to their take-over of the company, exclusion of the family from the board, excessive compensation for the executives, and the abandonment of what Bibiji describes as orthodox Sikh practices. The 2007, sale spurred numerous other lawsuits, including one against law firm Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt, as well as the parent company filing for bankruptcy protection. The lawsuit was settled on November 6, 2012.