Behind the Scenes at Yogi

Guru Hari Singh Khalsa is the Director of Research and Development at Golden Temple. He has been with the company for nearly three decades. When he's not blending tea or creating a new and delicious Yogi tea blend he enjoys cooking at home with fresh herbs from his garden and teaching yoga.

I grew up in a family of medical professionals, doctors and nurses. Surrounded by discussions at dinner and around the house of diseases and symptoms, of patients and drugs, my natural inclination was to become a doctor. When I got to college I was not enamored by the medical school profession and decided to set my course in a new direction. It was at this time that I began to practice yoga. Yoga gave me a sense of my own health and wellbeing and like medicine I discovered that it had the power and potential to heal.

One thing led to another and before I knew it I was living and working in Eugene, Oregon at Golden Temple heading up the Research and Development Department where we create new products for the company. It is from here that I began a deeper study of natural healing systems from around the world. We use this ancient knowledge coupled with modern scientific discoveries and our personal experience to develop our products.

But what is it that we are making? Let's look at how we formulate Yogi teas.

The answer is very simple... we work with herbs and botanicals. We understand that each herb has a myriad of ways that it may function in the human body and mind. We respect the individual herb for its potential to heal and we use the most pure form of the herb available whether it is organically grown or wild crafted. Take any herb and I can find 40 good things that it does. Nature is amazing in this respect.

The second part of the answer is "permutation and combination". If you look at our teas they are usually not just one herb. In fact most of our teas are combinations of 6 to 20 different botanicals. The secret to our formulations is combining herbs to create supportive or synergistic effects. There is a balance and a harmony that we strive for in the teas. Each tea has a specific direction and subsequent effect on the body and mind; we call this efficacy. In addition, we never forget flavor, aroma and the pure enjoyment of drinking a cup of tea.

The third part of the answer is "intention". When we're trying to do good things we need to have good intentions. Intention is an art and a science. It is a practice we learned from traditional Indian and Tibetan healing systems. Our good intentions also go into the growing and sourcing of the herbs, and into the production, packaging and shipping of the final product.

So some 27 years later I look back and see that we are now making somewhere around 500 million teabags a year globally.  500 million cups of tea!  Each cup warming, soothing, or invigorating a human being somewhere on the planet.