Natural Products & Supplements

Boulder has had a Universal Zero Waste Ordinance since 2015, implemented the following year, requiring every property owner in the city — residential and commercial alike — to subscribe to compost, recycling and trash service, and requiring businesses to provide correctly placed bins, post signage and train staff on sorting. The city’s strategic plan defines zero waste as an 85 percent diversion rate. On 1 January 2024 Boulder’s ten-cent disposable bag fee expanded to every retail store in the city, on the same date Colorado’s statewide ban on plastic checkout bags at large stores took effect.

Policy is the easy part. The harder question is where you can actually walk in with an empty container and walk out with it full, and here the honest answer is that Boulder County’s refill landscape is thinner than its reputation suggests. Two of the shops that dominate older roundups are gone or moved. What follows is what is genuinely operating, checked rather than copied from a 2021 list, with the closures named at the end so you do not drive to them.

Nude Foods Market, Boulder

Nude Foods Market at 3233 Walnut St is the closest thing the county has to a full zero-waste grocery, open daily 10am to 7pm. Verity Noble and Rachel Irons founded it in 2020 as a pandemic bike-delivery service; the Walnut Street storefront opened in October 2021 and a Denver store followed in April 2024. There is now a second Boulder shop as well, at 4593 Broadway St in North Boulder, keeping earlier hours than Walnut Street — 7:30am to 4pm on weekdays and 7:30am to 3pm at weekends. Everything — produce, body care, cleaning products, juices and eight rotating house-made meals — comes in reusable glass jars on a deposit system: $1.50 per jar with $1 back on return, the difference covering sanitising. A membership tier waives the per-jar fee. Roughly 45 percent of stock is locally sourced.

Simply Bulk Market, Longmont

Simply Bulk Market has been running at 418 Main St in downtown Longmont under a tagline that states the whole proposition: pay for the product, not the package. Hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 6pm, Saturday 9am to 5pm and Sunday 10am to 4pm. The range covers natural and organic food, spices and spice blends, coffee beans with an in-store grinder, teas, vinegars and oils, kombucha and pet supplies — plus, for wellness staples specifically, bulk body care including lotions and soaps and bulk cleaning supplies and laundry detergent. Bring your own containers, clean and sanitised; staff weigh them for tare at the counter before filling.

Bridge Refill Market, Erie

Bridge Refill Market sits at 285 Cheesman St in Erie, about twenty minutes from Boulder, closed Mondays and otherwise open Tuesday to Friday 10am to 6pm, Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday noon to 4pm. Christine Twining founded it after two decades living in six countries and watching packaging waste accumulate everywhere she went. Refill categories run to cleaning and laundry, bath and personal care, baby products, bulk food including spices, grains, legumes and baking staples, and teas. The mechanics are spelled out: bring a container, staff weigh it empty and attach a tracking tag, you fill it, and you check out by weight or volume.

Rebecca’s Herbal Apothecary, for the wellness side of bulk

Not a refill shop in the household-cleaning sense, but the closest thing Boulder has to a bulk wellness counter. Rebecca’s Herbal Apothecary & Supply at 1227 Spruce St sells all its bulk herbs by the ounce, cut to order at the counter rather than pre-bagged, alongside a wall of bulk essential oils, extracts, teas and blends stored in glass, plus base ingredients such as carrier oils, salts and clays for anyone making their own preparations. National low-waste guides list it as a bring-your-own-container stop, so call ahead if you are planning around it.

Ku Cha House of Tea

Ku Cha House of Tea at 1211 Pearl St was founded in 2006 by Rong Pan and Qin Liu, and is open Monday to Saturday 10am to 8pm and Sunday 11am to 6pm. The Pearl Street flagship carries more than a hundred whole-leaf varieties — green, white, oolong, black, puerh, chai, herbal and functional blends — scooped to order from bulk tins rather than sold in single-serve sachets. For a daily staple most people otherwise buy boxed and individually wrapped, that is a meaningful difference in packaging. Outside low-waste guides list it as a bring-your-own-container stop, so ask first.

Cedar & Hyde Mercantile

Cedar & Hyde Mercantile occupies 2015 and 2019 10th St on Boulder’s West End, founded in 2013 by Christie Lambert with her sister Poss, with the Home store added in 2018. Hours are Monday to Thursday 11am to 6pm, Friday and Saturday 10am to 6pm, closed Sunday. It appears on low-waste guides as a place to refill bottles with non-toxic cleaning supplies, so call ahead before making the trip for a refill specifically.

The ones older guides still send you to

Two corrections, because both still appear near the top of search results. Refill Revolution on Arapahoe Ave — the shop that anchored practically every Boulder zero-waste article written between 2019 and 2022 — is closed; a Colorado sustainability directory records the storefront closing and the business moving online only. The Conscious Merchant has left the county, moving from Main St in Louisville to Blake St in Denver. Alfalfa’s Market has closed both its Broadway and Louisville stores.

What to bring, and what to expect

A short practical list. Wide-mouth jars are easier to fill and easier to clean than bottles; bring more than you think you need, since the temptation to add one more thing is strong. Every shop here weighs your container empty before filling, so do not pre-fill anything at home. Expect the unit price to look higher than a supermarket own-brand and lower than the equivalent packaged natural-foods product, since you are not paying for the bottle. And expect the county’s real refill options to be Boulder, Longmont and Erie rather than a shop on every corner — the scarcity is genuine, and it is why the two closures above left a gap nobody has filled.

Featured image: Photo by Ella's Kitchen Company Limited, licensed CC BY 2.0. Source: Openverse.

The single fact that makes supplement labels hard to read is this one: under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, supplements are regulated as a category of food, not as drugs. The FDA states it plainly — it is not authorised to approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they are marketed. In many cases a company can bring a product to market without notifying the agency at all. Responsibility for safety, and for the accuracy of what the label claims, sits with the manufacturer, and the FDA acts after the fact.

Which means every reassuring mark on the bottle is voluntary, privately run, and paid for by somebody. That is not a scandal — several of these programs are rigorous and genuinely useful. But they test different things, to different depths, and two seals that look equally official can carry very different guarantees. Here is what each one actually covers, and where Boulder County fits into the picture.

The confusion that costs people the most: cGMP is not product testing

21 CFR Part 111, finalised in 2007, requires supplement manufacturers to have controls ensuring a product contains what it is labeled to contain and is not contaminated. That is a real standard, and the FDA’s own backgrounder explains its scope. But cGMP is a process standard applied to a facility. It does not mean an independent lab opened the finished bottle. NSF is explicit that GMP registration does not include product testing or certification, and that companies holding only GMP registration are not permitted to use the NSF certification mark on labels. Related trap: an FDA facility registration number is a filing receipt under the Bioterrorism Act, and the agency states it conveys no approval or endorsement of the facility or its products.

NSF Certified for Sport

The most demanding of the athlete-facing programs. NSF Certified for Sport runs in three parts: a facility audit conducted annually or twice yearly; contents testing that verifies label claims and screens for heavy metals, microbiological contaminants and pesticides; and a banned-substance screen of production lots against 290 substances prohibited by major athletic organizations, covering anabolic agents, stimulants, SARMs and diuretics. Certification carries ongoing obligations — annual audits, annual retesting, and fresh testing whenever a formulation or supplier changes. It is recognized by USADA, MLB and the NHL among others, and NSF publishes a searchable database of certified products that is worth checking before you buy rather than after.

USP Verified

Run by U.S. Pharmacopeia, the USP Verified mark makes four assurances: the product contains the listed ingredients in the declared potency and amounts; it holds no harmful levels of specified contaminants including heavy metals, microbes and pesticides; it will break down and release into the body within a specified time; and it is made under FDA cGMP. That third item — dissolution — is the one nobody else checks, and it matters, because a tablet that does not disintegrate is a tablet you did not absorb. The program involves facility audits, documentation review, lab testing and ongoing off-the-shelf retesting. The gap to know: USP Verified is not a banned-substance program.

Informed Sport and Informed Choice are not the same thing

Both are run by LGC, both use the same laboratory, and both screen for more than 285 banned substances and impurities using ISO 17025-accredited methods. The difference is sampling, and it is substantial. Informed Sport tests every batch before it is released to market. Informed Choice pulls at least twelve lots per year at random from retail shelves. Informed Sport is aimed at elite and drug-tested athletes and at military personnel; Informed Choice is aimed at active consumers. The two logos look similar enough that they are routinely treated as interchangeable, and for anyone subject to testing they are not.

BSCG, and the asterisk on its second program

The Banned Substances Control Group was founded in 2004 by Dr Don Catlin, who founded the UCLA Olympic analytical laboratory, along with his son Oliver Catlin and attorney Ryan Connolly. Its Certified Drug Free program screens for more than 450 banned substances, with testing on every finished product lot or monthly for ingredients. It also runs separate Certified Quality, Certified CBD, Certified GMP and Certified Facility programs. The asterisk worth knowing: BSCG’s own site states that Certified Quality — an annual program covering label verification, heavy metals, pesticides and microbiologicals — is not designed to provide anti-doping protection. Two BSCG marks, two very different promises.

ConsumerLab works the other way around

Structurally different from everything above, because it is not a logo a brand can buy. ConsumerLab has been a subscriber-funded review publication since 1999, buying products off retail shelves, testing them in-house and through independent labs, and publishing pass-or-fail results whether or not the brand wants them. It is owned by its management and takes no manufacturer revenue for its reviews. It does run a voluntary certification program a company can pay to enter, but it states that paying in no way guarantees the product will pass, and that participation does not exempt a product from future off-the-shelf review.

The two seals that are not about purity at all

Both of these get misread constantly. Non-GMO Project Verified is a GMO-avoidance claim: the standard requires testing of individual ingredients or precursors, not finished products, and the Project deliberately avoids the phrase GMO free as not legally or scientifically defensible. It says nothing about potency, heavy metals, microbial contamination or dissolution. USDA Organic is a production-practice standard, not a purity test. Products labeled 100 Percent Organic or Organic — at 95 percent or above — may carry the seal; Made with Organic must not. Nothing in the standard verifies dose or screens for heavy metals, which are geological rather than agricultural in origin.

What this looks like on a Boulder shelf

Three local examples make the distinctions concrete. Charlotte’s Web in Louisville illustrates both halves at once: it produces in what it describes as America’s first hemp-only NSF cGMP-registered dietary supplement facility, a facility credential, while separately several of its ReCreate gummies appear in NSF’s Certified for Sport product database as product-level certifications, and it publishes per-lot certificates of analysis covering cannabinoids, heavy metals, pesticides and solvents. Natural Grocers at 2685 Pearl St is a retailer that publishes its own screening rules — most vendors must use third-party GMP-certified facilities with contaminant screening, and the chain runs independent lab testing to confirm label claims across a supplement range exceeding 5,000 items. And Skratch Labs, a well-regarded local sports nutrition company, does not carry a third-party sport-certification mark. That is a legitimate business decision, and it is exactly why the absence of a logo should not be read as evidence of a problem.

A practical way to use all this

Start by deciding which question you actually have. If you are drug-tested, only the banned-substance programs answer it, and only Informed Sport and BSCG Certified Drug Free test every lot. If your worry is whether the dose on the label is the dose in the capsule, USP Verified and NSF Certified for Sport both check that, and USP alone checks that it dissolves. If your concern is farming practice, the organic and non-GMO seals are the right ones and the purity questions remain open. And if a bottle’s strongest claim is that it was made in an FDA-registered, GMP-compliant facility, you have been told something about a building, not about what is inside the bottle.

Featured image: Photo by Unknown, licensed CC BY 4.0. Source: Openverse.

The word adaptogen gets used loosely enough that it is worth pinning down. The Cleveland Clinic defines adaptogens as plants and mushrooms that help the body respond to stress, fatigue and physical strain, working to return the body toward a steady baseline. To qualify, a plant is generally expected to meet three conditions: non-toxic at normal doses, supportive of the stress response, and able to help the body come back to homeostasis. Ashwagandha, rhodiola, eleuthero and both American and Asian ginseng are the usual examples, along with fungi such as reishi. The Clinic also notes something worth carrying into any shop: supplements are not pre-approved by the FDA, and approval and safety are not the same thing.

Boulder County is an unusually good place to buy this category, and not only because of the natural products industry clustered here. It also has a dense herbal education scene, which means the person behind the counter is often a credentialed clinical herbalist rather than a retail clerk. Below are seven places that actually carry loose herbs, formulated extracts or custom preparations, ranging from a downtown apothecary to a mushroom farm.

Rebecca’s Herbal Apothecary & Supply

Rebecca Luna opened Rebecca’s at 1227 Spruce Street in 2004, after years of teaching botanical medicine-making and getting frustrated that there was nowhere in town to buy supplies. The defining feature is a full wall of loose bulk herbs sold by the ounce, much of it sourced from Boulder-area farms — the shop publishes a Meet the Farmers page naming its growers. Alongside that sit tea blends, tinctures, flower essences, hydrosols, essential oils and a facial care line made on site. It is open Monday to Friday 10am to 6pm and Saturday 11am to 5pm, and it also runs the Rocky Mountain Community Herbalism School.

Little Herbal Apothecary, Lafayette

Little Herbal Apothecary was founded in 2015 by certified clinical herbalist Faith Rodgers at 210 S Public Rd in Old Town Lafayette, and nearly the entire staff is credentialed. General manager Amber Wood is a certified clinical herbalist and nutritionist; Alli Barber is a certified herbalist; Rachel Bull is a certified clinical herbalist and flower essence practitioner who takes private consultations. The shop stocks organic bulk herbs, tinctures, tea blends, essential oils and skincare handcrafted in small batches in Lafayette. A Make and Take Night runs the first Friday of every month, with workshops through the year on plant identification, skincare and women’s health.

Hanna’s Herb Shop, now in Niwot

The county’s oldest herb shop, dating to 1957 and built around the herbal combinations and books of founder Hanna Kroeger. One practical warning: Hanna’s Herb Shop has moved, and most directory listings have not caught up. Yelp, Yellow Pages and several local guides still show 5684 Valmont Rd in Boulder; the shop’s own contact page lists 7960 Niwot Rd, Suite D-15, Niwot. Hours are Tuesday to Friday 10am to 6pm and Saturday 10am to 4pm, closed Sunday and Monday. It carries Kroeger’s original formula line alongside general herbal remedies, and has been serving customers in person and by mail for more than sixty years.

Boulder Mushroom

Boulder Mushroom was founded by Zach Hedstrom after roughly a decade of community mycology teaching, with the stated aim of building a professional-quality mycology center. The operation breeds mushroom strains adapted to substrate materials available locally, and sells spawn, grow kits, fresh culinary mushrooms and small-batch dual-extract tinctures. The tincture line covers Lion’s Mane, Red Reishi and Turkey Tail at $20 to $30 each, with a three-variety pack at $55 to $80. The label is deliberately spare — mushrooms, cane alcohol and water, fruiting bodies only, no grain filler. Hedstrom’s team has also worked on mycelium-based wildfire mitigation in Boulder County.

Six Persimmons Apothecary

The traditional Chinese medicine end of the local scene. Six Persimmons Apothecary operates at 1435 Yarmouth Ave #104 in Boulder, run by David Scrimgeour, L.Ac., a licensed acupuncturist and master herbalist, alongside Kathy Thorpe, cHom, a certified classical homeopath. Formulas here are dispensed as part of treatment rather than picked off a shelf: Scrimgeour prescribes a targeted Chinese herbal formula per patient, and the practice also carries professional-grade nutritional supplements and offers classical homeopathic consultations. A handful of its retail formulas, including the Cold Nip immune tonic, are sold separately online for people who are not patients.

Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism, and its public clinic

The Colorado School of Clinical Herbalism was established in 2003 by Paul Bergner as the North American Institute of Medical Herbalism and is now directed by John Whiteman and Lindy Reinhardt, at 424 East Simpson St in Lafayette. It is approved and regulated by the Colorado Department of Higher Education’s Private Occupational School Board and is a member school of the American Herbalists Guild, with programs running from Fundamentals of Medical Herbalism through full Clinical Herbalism Certification. The detail that matters to non-students: the school operates the CSCH Clinic, a holistic consultation center open to the public at a published standard fee of $35 an hour.

The Boulder Tea Company

The online arm of the Boulder Dushanbe Teahouse, The Boulder Tea Company keeps a certified herbalist and a master tea blender on staff and carries more than a hundred loose-leaf teas. For this category specifically it sells single-herb offerings such as loose ashwagandha root, along with adaptogenic blends including Organic Hocus Focus. A Farm and Garden collection carries salves at around $11.50, bath teas at $19.95 and seed kits at $19.50. The family behind it also stewards Three Leaf Farm, described as a small organic haven down the road from the blending facility, which grows herbs and flowers for the blends.

A note before you spend money

Two practical things. First, adaptogens interact with real medications — rhodiola, ashwagandha and ginseng all have documented interactions, and thyroid medication, sedatives and immunosuppressants are common flashpoints. The advantage of buying from a staffed counter rather than a website is that you can say what else you are taking. Second, one closure worth knowing about: Alfalfa’s Market on Broadway, long a default stop for bulk herbs and wellness goods, has closed, though parts of its website remain live and still turn up in search results. If a guide sends you there, it is out of date.

This article describes what local businesses offer and, where noted, what they say about their own services. Boulder Vibe does not endorse any treatment for any condition, and nothing here is medical advice. Please talk with your doctor or another qualified clinician before starting something new.

Featured image: “Dried Herbs” by Caitlinator — CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/21484712@N00/4534924413

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

If you work in natural products anywhere in the United States, you already know that a disproportionate number of the people you deal with have a Boulder area code. That concentration is not an accident of climate or a marketing story — it is the compounding result of a handful of companies that started here in the late 1960s and 1970s, sold for a great deal of money, and released hundreds of experienced operators back into a town of roughly 105,000 people who then started the next generation of brands. The Boulder Economic Council counts 47 firms and 1,787 employees in the metro area’s natural products sector, at an employment concentration of 4.7 against a national average of 1.0. Statewide, a 2020 study put the natural and organic food industry’s contribution at $3.1 billion and 22,142 jobs.

What follows is the short version of how that happened, told through the institutions that are still here. It is a useful piece of local literacy: it explains why the grocery stores stock what they stock, why so many people at your gym are in sales for a bar company, and why the trade press for a national industry is edited from an office off 28th Street.

Celestial Seasonings and the Original Story

The origin point most people cite is Celestial Seasonings, founded in Boulder in 1969 by a group that included Mo Siegel, initially from herbs gathered in the surrounding mountains. Red Zinger and Sleepytime followed by 1972, and the company now says it serves more than 1.6 billion cups a year using over 100 ingredients sourced from more than 35 countries. Its Boulder factory still runs public tours and remains one of the few places in town where you can walk through a working manufacturing floor. For the industry’s purposes, Celestial mattered most as proof of concept: a hippie-adjacent herbal product from Colorado could become a national grocery brand.

Naturally Colorado, formerly Naturally Boulder

Naturally Colorado is the trade body at the center of the cluster, and its name change is itself part of the story — it formed in 2005 as Naturally Boulder, a 501(c)(6) economic development initiative started by industry veterans and entrepreneurs, and has since widened to the state. Its stated purpose is to make Colorado a place to launch and scale a natural products company, and it runs the practical infrastructure that implies: a pitch competition, a mentorship program, a Retail Launch Lab, monthly events, office hours, a member directory, and a CPG academy. The Boulder model it created has since been copied into a national network of Naturally chapters.

New Hope Network

New Hope Network, headquartered in Boulder’s 80301 area, is the trade media and events business that serves the natural products industry nationally — and it is arguably the single biggest reason the sector’s center of gravity stayed here rather than migrating to a larger market. New Hope publishes the industry’s trade coverage and runs the Expo events at which most emerging natural brands make their first serious buyer contact. When a founder in another state needs to be in the room where retail buyers are, the organization putting on that room is run from Boulder.

Justin’s

Justin’s is the clearest example of the second-generation pattern. Justin Gold started making nut butters in his Boulder kitchen because he could not find what he wanted at the store, sold at the farmers market, and built the business into a national brand that Hormel acquired in 2016 in a deal reported at $286 million. The relevant part for Boulder is what that kind of exit does locally: it converts one founder’s success into a pool of capital, packaging expertise, retail relationships, and co-manufacturing knowledge that the next twenty founders can draw on without leaving town.

Bhakti

Bhakti follows the same shape a decade later. Founder Brook Eddy traveled to India in 2002, fell for the homemade masala chai she drank there, and later developed a fresh-pressed ginger chai concentrate from organic ingredients — the name taken from bhakti, meaning devotion. The company brews in Longmont, sells wholesale and by subscription, and is a good illustration of what the Boulder cluster actually provides: a founder with a recipe and no food-industry background could find co-packing, distribution advice, and buyers inside a twenty-mile radius.

Boulder Economic Council

The Boulder Economic Council tracks the sector formally and is where the concentration figures above come from. Its natural products page is the reference to cite when someone questions whether the Boulder cluster is real or merely well publicised: an employment concentration nearly five times the national average is not a story, it is a measurement. The BEC also documents how the sector interlocks with Boulder’s other clusters — aerospace, bioscience, outdoor recreation — which share a labor market and, increasingly, investors.

What It Means If You Live Here

Three practical consequences. Boulder grocery shelves function as a test market, so you routinely see products here months before they appear nationally, and some of what you see will never appear nationally at all. The industry’s density means a genuinely large share of local jobs sit in food and supplement companies, which is worth knowing if you are job hunting and had assumed the town was only software and federal labs. And the cluster is not static — Wild Oats was acquired and absorbed, Alfalfa’s Boulder store is gone, and the current generation of brands will consolidate in turn. The institutions in this article have outlasted several such cycles, which is the more interesting thing about them.

Featured image: “Loose Leaf Tea” by HarshLight — CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/). Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/79172203@N00/7928242596