Colorado’s natural and organic industry contributes an estimated $3.1 billion to the state economy and supports more than 22,000 jobs, and a disproportionate share of that activity sits inside Boulder County. The Boulder Economic Council counts 47 natural products firms in the metro area employing 1,787 people, an employment concentration roughly 4.7 times the national average. What the statistic obscures is how ordinary it all is at street level. The tincture in a medicine cabinet, the amino acid powder in a gym bag, and the drink mix in a bottle on the Diagonal may all have been formulated within a fifteen-minute drive of Pearl Street.
Worth saying plainly up front: several of the companies below are in Louisville, not Boulder proper. The industry sits across the county rather than inside the city limits, and the distinction matters if you are trying to visit one. What follows is not a ranking. It is seven operating companies, what each actually makes, and the detail that separates it from the others.
WishGarden Herbs, and the long view
The oldest herbal formulator in the county by a wide margin. WishGarden Herbs was founded in 1979 by midwife Catherine Hunziker, who began making small-batch liquid extracts for the families she attended. It is still woman-owned and family-run, with Hunziker’s daughter Anna Harshman serving as VP of Impact and Development, and it became a Certified B Corporation in 2025. The company works almost entirely in fast-acting liquid extracts rather than capsules, with more than 130 blends drawn from over 150 botanical species. Roughly 63 percent of its botanicals are US-grown or wildcrafted, and it runs its own cGMP facility in Colorado. The office is at 321 S. Taylor Ave. in Louisville.
Skratch Labs and the rice-cake origin story
Skratch Labs began in February 2012, when exercise physiologist Allen Lim — who earned his PhD in integrative physiology at CU Boulder in 2004 and then worked as a sport scientist for the Phonak, Garmin and RadioShack professional cycling teams — got tired of watching riders develop gut trouble on commercial drink mixes. He started mixing his own and boiling rice in hotel kitchens to make portable rice cakes. He co-founded the company with Aaron Foster and Ian MacGregor. Inc. named it the third fastest-growing US food and beverage company in 2014. Its flagship cafe and store, Skratch Labs Table, sits at 1245 Alpine Ave in north Boulder.
Kion, and the case for a short catalogue
Kion runs from 3980 N Broadway in Boulder and is led by co-founder and CEO Angelo Keely, who grew up inside the trade — his parents ran a natural health food store and his father imported botanicals for supplement production. The company’s distinguishing choice is restraint: roughly a dozen products total, where competitors carry hundreds. The line centers on Kion Aminos, an essential amino acid formula sold as powder, single-serve packets and capsules, alongside grass-fed whey protein, creatine, colostrum, omega fish oil and coffee. Products are made in an NSF-certified cGMP facility with third-party testing on finished goods.
Quicksilver Scientific and the delivery-system bet
Quicksilver Scientific was founded in 2005 by Christopher Shade, PhD, and works out of a 60,000-square-foot facility in Louisville with roughly 90 staff. The company is built around a proprietary liposomal and nanoemulsion delivery system intended to improve how much of a nutrient actually reaches cells rather than passing through. The catalogue runs to liposomal vitamins, structured detoxification protocols and formulas including Longevity Elite, Membrane Mend and Immune Charge+, and the business also offers heavy-metal toxicity testing services. It posted 116 percent three-year growth and landed at #3,189 on the 2021 Inc. 5000, its second appearance on that list.
PanTheryx and a category most people have never heard of
PanTheryx sits at 4845 Pearl East Circle in Boulder and builds its products around bovine colostrum, the antibody-rich first milk a cow produces after calving. Founded in 2007, it acquired APS BioGroup in Phoenix and La Belle Associates in Bellingham, Washington, which made it the only colostrum manufacturer operating multiple production facilities, and it later bought the TruBiotics brand from Bayer. Its own brands include DiaResQ, Relesium and Life’s First Naturals. The company raised more than $52 million in late 2023, bringing total funding past $190 million.
Charlotte’s Web, and the story that moved a category
Charlotte’s Web is headquartered in Louisville and was founded in 2011 by the Stanley brothers, who bred the proprietary hemp genetics later named for Charlotte Figi. A 2013 CNN segment by Dr Sanjay Gupta turned a regional operation into national demand almost overnight. The company now makes full-spectrum hemp CBD oils, gummies, topicals acquired through Abacus Health, and functional mushroom gummies launched in 2025. It listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange in 2018 and has traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the ticker CWEB since May 2019, employed roughly 110 people as of 2024, and produces in an NSF cGMP-registered hemp-only dietary supplement facility.
Bluebird Botanicals and the townhouse years
Bluebird Botanicals started in 2012 as Gaia Botanicals, run by Brandon Beatty out of a Boulder townhouse the early team called the Dragon House. It pivoted to CBD in 2013 and made its first sales that October. The company now operates from 410 S. Arthur Ave. in Louisville, with a line covering full-spectrum, broad-spectrum and THC-free oils, gummies, softgels, topicals, pet formulas and mushroom supplements. It acquired Precision Botanical in 2021, sources hemp domestically with third-party lab testing, and Beatty sits on the board of the Industrial Hemp Research Foundation.
Why so many of them are here
The concentration is not an accident, and it predates any of these companies. Boulder’s convention bureau traces the lineage to the 1896 Boulder-Colorado Sanitarium and its emphasis on plant-based nutrition; the modern chapter starts with Celestial Seasonings in 1969 and runs through White Wave, Horizon Organic and Wild Oats. The trade group founded here in 2005 as Naturally Boulder has since expanded statewide as Naturally Colorado, and New Hope Network — publisher of Nutrition Business Journal and producer of Natural Products Expo West — still runs out of an office on 29th Street. An industry with close to $100 billion in annual US sales is convened and measured from Boulder, which is a genuinely odd thing for a city of about 105,000 people.
Before you go looking
Most of these companies sell direct online and through retailers rather than operating a storefront, so treat the addresses as context, not shopping directions. The two exceptions worth a visit are Skratch Labs Table on Alpine Ave, which is a working cafe, and the retail shelves at any local natural grocer, where most of these labels turn up alongside national brands. If you want to understand what the certifications on those labels actually mean before you buy, that is a separate and more useful exercise than picking by address.
Featured image: “Vitamin Packaging” by colindunn — CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/31192024@N05/4397922243
