The natural wonder of boulder: 'we're going to revolutionize the way people eat'.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Establishment of food comapnies in Boulder, Colorado - Cover Story

When Mark Retzloff and S.M. "Hass" Hassan opened Pearl Street Market in Boulder in 1979, they could look across the street and see Steve Demos in his tiny vegan deli and tofu shop, stirring a tub of soybeans to make into tofu blocks.

Four years later, Retzloff and Hassan opened a bigger natural-foods store that they named Alfalfa's, setting the stage for natural-foods supermarkets that are still spreading across the country today.

But the early 1980s were still days of struggle in the natural-foods business. Demos couldn't afford his own delivery truck back then, so he and Alfalfa's shared one. One side of the truck advertised "Alfalfa's," the other side touted "White Wave," the name Demos gave his tofu enterprise. "It worked very well," Demos says of the arrangement. "I made them put curtains--literally canvas covers--on the sides of the truck. When we drove into a Safeway parking lot, I told the driver to drop the covers because I didn't want anyone to see Alfalfa's advertised on the side. It worked. Saved me half my costs in trucking."

It's not surprising these three entrepreneurs ended up in Boulder, a magnet for counterculture, new-age thinking, healthy outdoor living, and on top of that a college town vibrating with creative ambition. Retzloff and Hassan were followers of the Indian "Guru Maharaj Ji" and had met in 1973 at a gathering in Houston for the guru's Divine Light Mission, which was headquartered in Denver. Demos himself had embraced Buddism while hitchhiking around India for four years. He came to Boulder to study Tai Chi Chuan, a combination of meditation and yoga, but also to prove that a business model built on environmental stewardship, social responsibility and authentic food could work better than pure capitalism. These three, and many others like them in the late 1970s and early 1980s, would help make Boulder into what it is today--the epicenter, or Silicon Valley, of the natural-foods industry.

Once largely a cottage industry, the natural-products category nationwide now accounts for $43 billion in annual revenues, and Boulder businesses have been at the forefront of that growth. Companies like White Wave, Alfalfa's, Celestial Seasonings, Horizon Organic Dairy and New Hope Natural Media have merged or been acquired and become publicly owned, and investors' money has given these companies the muscle for fancier packaging, broader marketing, wider distribution and faster expansion. And yet these companies have remained in Boulder, albeit usually as corporate divisions. Meanwhile, new entrepreneurs gravitate to Boulder where they have the support system of natural-organic industry veterans and a receptive consumer base on which to test their new products.

A BREWING MOVEMENT

Celestial Seasonings, the herbal tea maker, is generally regarded as Boulder's first enduring entrant into the natural-products industry. Now known as the Hain Celestial Group after merging with the Hain Food Group in 2000, Celestial started in 1968 with Mo Siegel picking wild herbs for tea in the Boulder foothills. Siegel joined forces with John Hay in the tea enterprise, and they found a steady buyer for their herb harvests when Green Mountain Grainery opened in 1970.

In the ensuing three decades, Boulder has been the launching pad and the home to all kinds of natural-product ideas and enterprises. Following soon after Alfalfa's, Boulder convenience-store owners Mike Gilliland and Libby Cook, a married couple, bought Boulder vegetarian natural-foods store Crystal Market in 1987, and from that launched the first Wild Oats Market.

A year later, Doug Greene's New Hope Natural Media, publisher of six natural-product magazines and host of the natural-product industry's two major trade shows, relocated from Pennsylvania to Boulder, adding to the city's claim as the center of the natural-products industry.

Demos regards himself along with Retzloff, Hassan and others from the late '70s as the "second graduating class" of the Boulder natural-products movement, following...