Founded in 1969, the Celestial Seasonings group has always created flavourful, all natural herbal and healthy teas. In its beginnings, Celestial Seasonings took pride in harvesting herbs by hand from the Rocky Mountains, then dried, blended and packaged these into hand-sewn muslin bags to be sold at local health food stores. This cottage industry turned into an overnight success.

Today Celestial Seasonings is the largest specialty tea manufacturer in North America.In addition to the Rocky Mountain produce, the company now sources more than 100 different ingredients from over 35 countries to create its delicious, all-natural herbal teas.

Over the years the increase in demand has required that production methods were made as efficient as possible. When the company began distributing cases of tea throughout the United States and globally, it was important to keep track of inventory and expiry dates from initial production to final delivery. Over time, more and more  customers asked for barcodes to provide proficient delivery.

After time, the company’s more traditional method of a labor-intensive off-line print-and-apply operation became impractical for the fast moving company. Whereby Hein Celestial Group turned to Markem-Imaje.

In 2002, Celestial settled on the Markem Model 5200 dual-head large character ink-jet coders, which they installed in their plant for printed on the sides of their packaging. In 2004 the plant installed seven more of markem’s coders , allowing them to print onto five different sizes of cases containing 6, 10, or 12 cartons to total up to 275 different products. Preferring markem’s advanced technologies to more common ink-based prints, Celestial also chose Markem’s advanced resin-based TouchDry Ink for printing their barcodes to achieve maximum quality and efficiency.