Yogi Tea creates and manufactures a wide variety of premium teas, including green, herbal, black and red tea. Yogi Tea is part of Golden Temple of Oregon, LLC. Golden Temple employs about 150 people in the United States and Europe, with offices in Eugene and Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...

, and in Hamburg, Germany.

History

Yogi Bhajan, an Indian spiritual teacher who brought the Sikh religion to the West, began teaching Kundalini Yoga

Kundalini yoga

Kundalini yoga is a physical, mental and spiritual discipline for developing strength, awareness, character, and consciousness. Practitioners call Kundalini yoga the yoga of awareness because it focuses primarily on practices that expand sensory awareness and intuition in order to raise individual...

 in America in 1969. After each yoga class, he served a special spice tea to his students, which they affectionately named "Yogi Tea". The tea was a blend of five traditional Ayurvedic

Ayurveda

Ayurveda or ayurvedic medicine is a system of traditional medicine native to India and a form of alternative medicine. In Sanskrit, words , meaning "longevity", and , meaning "knowledge" or "science". The earliest literature on Indian medical practice appeared during the Vedic period in India,...

 spices: cardamom

Cardamom

Cardamom refers to several plants of the genera Elettaria and Amomum in the ginger family Zingiberaceae. Both genera are native to India and Bhutan; they are recognised by their small seed pod, triangular in cross-section and spindle-shaped, with a thin papery outer shell and small black seeds...

 seed, cinnamon

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a spice obtained from the inner bark of several trees from the genus Cinnamomum that is used in both sweet and savoury foods...

 bark, clove

Clove

Cloves are the aromatic dried flower buds of a tree in the family Myrtaceae. Cloves are native to the Maluku islands in Indonesia and used as a spice in cuisines all over the world...

 bud, ginger root

Ginger

Ginger is the rhizome of the plant Zingiber officinale, consumed as a delicacy, medicine, or spice. It lends its name to its genus and family . Other notable members of this plant family are turmeric, cardamom, and galangal....

 and black pepper

Black pepper

Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is usually dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The fruit, known as a peppercorn when dried, is approximately in diameter, dark red when fully mature, and, like all drupes, contains a single seed...

. Ayurvedic medicine holds that this combination of spices has unique, healthful properties, so they are still included in many current Yogi Tea formulas.

In the 1970s, students of Yogi Bhajan opened Golden Temple Vegetarian Restaurants in the United States, Canada and Europe. Through these restaurants, the first batches of Yogi Tea were sold to the public, and by 1984, the Yogi Tea Company was born. Over the next couple of years, the business grew to nationwide distribution, with three flavors of finely ground spices packaged in teabags. Then in 1988, Yogi Tea’s team of herbalists expanded the line to include a number of formulas developed to address specific health needs.

In 2010 Yogi Tea was sued by Yogi Bhajan's widow Bibiji Inderjit Kaur Puri, and the State of Oregon. The suits allege that trusted advisers of the Yogi had forged documents regarding 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.