Create a Clean, Healthy, and Affordable Lifestyle
Traditional Medicinals is an independent company that embraces sustainability, ingredient purity, and social and environmental activism. A Certified B Corporation and California Certified Green Business, we’re the leading seller of wellness tea in the U.S. and the pioneer of the wellness tea category in the U.S. and Canada.
Our roots go back to a third generation herbalist named Rosemary Gladstar, who was raised close to the earth in the farmlands of Northern California. In the late 1960s, while living in the coastal redwood forest, she met community activist and environmentalist Drake Sadler. The young couple was part of a movement of back-to-the-land baby boomers seeking an alternative lifestyle, including natural foods and herbal remedies. Together, they shared a vision for the rebirth of herbalism in North America, and in 1974 they co-founded Traditional Medicinals.
Today, Rosemary is often referred to as the god mother of modern herbalism. She is a well-respected teacher and author who also founded The California School of Herbal Studies and the nonprofit United Plant Savers. Although no longer active in the company, Rosemary’s original herbal formulas (including Throat Coat, Mother’s Milk and Smooth Move) continue to fulfill the promise of quality and integrity.
After decades of leadership, Drake transitioned away from company management and is now focused (with support from Traditional Medicinals Foundation) on working with and empowering the mostly indigenous and impoverished communities around the world that collect and cultivate medicinal plants. These investments in supplier community well-being provide food and water security, access to health care, education and training, economic development, and gender equality.
As Rosemary has a continued commitment to herbal education, Drake remains passionate about environmental stewardship and social equity. Forever kindred spirits, their founding values are infused into the core principles of the company and serve as a model for responsible business.
How do you tell the difference between good companies and good marketing? It starts by walking our talk and aligning our ethics with those organizations that measure high standards.
In 2010, we became a Certified B Corp by implementing rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. In 1992, we joined Green America’s Green Business Network™ of socially and environmentally responsible businesses.
Learn more about our commitment to using business as a tool for positive change.
We’re committed to sourcing botanical ingredients that are produced according to rigorous sustainability standards, including criteria for measuring ecological, economic, and social sustainability.
Today, over 99% of the herbs that we buy, whether cultivated or wild-collected, are organic.
For nearly four decades now, we’ve been committed to sustainable agriculture. We began sourcing organically grown herbs back in the 1970s from America’s first major organic medicinal plant farm, Trout Lake Farm. Today, we continue to buy herbs from our friends at Trout Lake Farm.
In 1980, we were the first American company to market a range of organically and domestically grown herbal teas made from herbs grown at Trout Lake Farm. In 1995, we became a member of the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF), both an organic certification agency and organic trade association.
Traditional Medicinals® is a CCOF-certified organic handler and processor. CCOF inspects our operation and reviews our labels to verify that we meet the USDA National Organic Program (NOP) organic standards and regulations, which became law in 2001.
By the mid-2000’s, we were able to transition nearly all of our wild-collected botanical ingredients to organic certification in compliance with USDA’s new “Wild-crop Harvesting Practice Standard”.
We believe in the integrity and biodiversity of our ecosystems. That’s why 100% of our herbal teas are Non-GMO Project Verified. Our Non-GMO standard not only applies to the herbs we use, but also to our tea bags and strings – ensuring that every part of what steeps in your cup is healthy for your body and the environment.
It is a long-standing policy of ours to purchase and use non-GMO (genetically modified organism) botanical ingredients and packaging components. We remain opposed to the practice of genetic engineering, an experimental technology which merges DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) from different species, creating unstable combinations of plant, animal, bacterial and viral genes that cannot occur in nature or in traditional crossbreeding.
We believe that everyone deserves a fair wage for hard work. That’s one of the reasons why we’re committed to fair trade. Traditional Medicinals® is a registered Fair Trade “brandholder”, “licensee” and “manufacturer,” and our products are certified by Fair Trade USA, an independent third party certifier. We were an early adopter of Fair Trade, having launched our first fair trade tea product in 1998, just one year after Fairtrade International (FLO) was established. We continue to work closely with our network of producers to help them to implement fair trade standards and get certified.
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The FairWild Standard was established in 2006 to support efforts to ensure that wild-collected botanicals are produced in a socially and ecologically sound way. We use herbs like dandelion root, European elder flower, linden flower, licorice root, raspberry leaf and stinging nettle leaf that are FairWild Certified through the FairWild Foundation-accredited inspection and certification body known as the Institute for Market Ecology (IMO).
In 2009, we became the first company in the world to market FairWild® certified products. Today about 14% of our products contain FairWild® certified ingredients.
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Family-Owned Small Business
Based in Anaheim, CA
Shipping to the US only