Will the World Wake Up to Revolutionize Our Food System with John Roulac

Yeah. Welcome, Zhena.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thanks so much for hosting us here. We're super excited to learn about your tea. And it's so beautiful.

Thank you. Do you have any specific questions? Or do you want me just to start rattling things off?

Perfect. Just love to learn about you a little bit. I know you've been in this business a really long time, I don't want to say really long.

It's okay.

Didn't mean it like that. I just mean, you've been in this business a long time, so I'd love to learn how did you get into this business?

Well, my grandmother was a Roma Gypsy from the Ukraine. She was a medicine woman so she taught me herbal medicine growing up, and we had a little blog. We actually owned an acre in the middle of a little town, and the whole thing was herbs, flowers, fruits and vegetables. And so I just grew up with the land, and then I started studying herbal medicine in my late teens, early 20's with a school, and then I went to Peru and studied herbal medicine with shamans and ethnobotanists. And then I discovered tea at about 19, like matcha and Japanese tea ceremony. And then by the time I was 22, I had my first tea company. Tea, it's in my blood. It's my favorite thing. It helps us connect with others in a really beautiful way. Culturally in Asia, sitting around and having tea, and doing tea ceremony is very natural. It's a form of moving meditation and some mindfulness practice. And for me, it just brings me sanity, it brings me connection, it's so fun to formulate. I'm getting ready to go to Asia for the spring harvest. I get to go hang out in Taiwan and drink oolongs and decide what I'm bringing over. I get to go to Japan and drink matcha and decide what to, it's like nature, it's all the best of nature and what nature can be cultivated into with great human care. So it's really my favorite thing in the world. And it's beautiful and amazing.

So I love that. You also went to Herbal Medical School.

Yeah. I got certified as an aromatherapist. And I started using essential oils and tea. And so the safe to ingest essential oils, I started realizing that medically and flavor wise, there was so much better for us, and so I just started creating my own blending methodology. I like to make medicinal herbs that taste like candy. So that's the focus for me. And so I joke that I'm like the mom that is kind of able to put broccoli in pancakes and the kids don't know.

I wish you come over to my house.

It's the same with tea. Like if you get like in a straggle list or you get certain herbs that are like the best things for your body, and I can actually mask the medicinal flavor and make them taste like pumpkin pancakes and maple syrup.

Willy Wonka Tea.

So fun. Yeah.

So I know you know a little bit about Essential Ingredients, NextGenChef and everything that we do. And our goal really is to make all these things more accessible to people. And this just sounds like it's a great way to make healthy things more accessible to people.

Yes, exactly. Yeah. So when I started my first company, Zhena Gypsy Tea,, we were the first sort of 100% certified organic tea company in the world, in the US at least, and sort of you USDA certification didn't even exist, the organic certification. And then we became very passionate. I discovered the women in the tea fields didn't have health care, maternity leave, some didn't even have toilets when they were working, so I became one of the founders of the Fair Trade Movement and got Fair Trade in a Walmart, and Kroger, and Safeway and all of that. And what I discovered was once people knew that something was good for them, and then they knew that the people in the tea fields weren't being cared for, like they didn't want that, everybody wanted to make sure everything was helpful, regenerative and good for the workers. And so I've always had just such a beautiful mission with (inaudible) coffee drinkers too, like organic and Fair Trade. So it's been lovely to help bring health to our consumers, but also to bring health to our workers 9000 miles away.

That's great.

Was that always part of your mission from the day you started your business?

Yeah. My first business I started, I was a single mom and my son needed a life saving operation and I didn't have the proper health insurance. I was broke. I was peddling tea off of a little cart basically. So when I discovered that the workers were making $1 a day and had a very high infant mortality rate, it was like all of a sudden, I've been called and I realized what I went through. In the state of California, there were safety nets, and there were welfare programs for young moms like me. And in the tea fields, there was none. And so the women were losing babies and didn't have health care. And I thought, oh, my god, everyone's drinking tea 9000 miles away and they don't realize that if they're not choosing like really responsibly grown teas that they're actually causing harm. And so I wrote a book called Life by the Cup that talks all about this, but I basically went to Sri Lanka and India and I started touring the tea fields, the non organic, non Fair Trade and Organic Fair Trade. I made videos and I made photos sort of presentations for all the executives at major retailers. And it was amazing. Once they saw what was possible, they didn't want to ever, like support, hurting workers by not buying from a reputable garden that was actually caring for their workers. So I was married in our tea fields, our tea workers through our wedding and a Lakshmi temple in the middle of our beautiful, it's the first biodynamic in the world as well. We do biodynamics.

So listeners that don't know what biodynamic, can--

Biodynamic is basically organic plus. So biodynamic ensures that not only is the soil fed with micronutrients from other herbs, quartz crystal for silica. And instead of fertilizers, they'll use like chamomile blossoms and everything to balance the micronutrients in the soil. And then it's also regenerative. It reabsorbed like co2. And it's a cosmic, so it is actually also tied with planetary motion. So biodynamic agriculture is based on the movement of like the Moon and Venus and they'll harvest, trim and do everything with biodynamic with actually the cycles of the universe.

Amazing. I have a question. You're obviously the master of tea, but also your design aesthetic is just amazing.

I love design.

I can tell with this beautiful place. When you are coming up with your packaging for your tea, the bottle, listeners can see the photos I'm sure. Did you know in your mind what you wanted?

For the original, Zhena Gypsy Tea bottles were glass, apothecary jars. And once we got into mass market because we were in 20,000 grocery stores, we went into tents, and they were really beautiful. And they won tons of awards. They were kind of goofy, they were cute. But then with Magic Hour, this is like my grownup version of myself and I wanted to use glass that would actually re infuse the plants inside with energy. The miron glass from the Netherlands it's a scientific glass that is basically biophotonics. So the bio, sorry, I will explain. So the key is to use biodynamic so all that energy and all that alignment goes in with the soil being super nutritious and then it grows the best tea and the best plants. And then the actual glass, this particular glass, when the sun hits it, it only lets in violet, and violet actually reinforces the plant. It kind of re-energizes it. The guy who created it, who patented it found the glass that was in the mummy tombs that had preserved the essential oils for thousands of years and then he reverse engineered it and then discovered that there's a certain ray of violet color like the violet flame. It's a meditation also like ancient meditation. So the color violet actually is it infuses that so it actually re energizes it.

Incredible. And did you find, just going back to your apothecary roots and things like that. When you walk past your studio, you get this amazing smell, essential oils, and I just feel like everyone's shoulders just drop. Is that very intentional?

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, as an aroma therapist who practices herbal medicine and tea ceremony, when you start to formulate, well, when I start to formulate, all formulate with a base note, a heart note, and then a top note the way a perfumer would, and that's aromatherapy and action as well. So there are certain herbs and spices that will infuse you with that are anti-inflammatory if you drink them. But also when you smell them, there's an energy to it as well.

So question for you, you're designing these to be medicinal, so that's amazing. Where I was going with this is that there's these new spaces for food, new categories is where I was going. So what category does this go? Medicinal, foods, does it go in medicinal foods?

Well, what category do you go in?

Me? I don't go into, I'm not trying to put it a category, it doesn't go to category.

And that's why when I sold my last tea company, we were stuck in the grocery aisle, and we could never get back out. It was horrible. I was selling to distributors that were selling to grocery stores and they would charge us back all this money. And it was the worst business I was ever had. I hated it. And then once we get in with the Category Manager, you could never do anything else. I'd be like, well, now I want to create a body care made out of tea. And it was like, oh, you gotta go to the Category Manager. I just can't do it. So I would say it's magic. I mean, it's the category of magic. It's wellness. It's a connection. We have thousands of women who meet every week with me online and we do tea ceremonies, and we do rituals, and we do journaling. It's really a connection, it's community, it's wellness and self care. It's herbs and spices, it's essential oils, it's tea, it's functional.

I was thinking more about tea and aromatherapy because I think of that when I think of, I'm just using this as an example. Let's just say you get a headache. And sometimes, you might have to pay for that. You might have tea for that. So if I was going to come in and I might say, oh, which tea do you have for my--

It all depends on your body. So headaches usually come from, the way I see it is toxicity in the liver. So I would start with your liver,and I would look at your hormone levels and what you've been exposed to. And so I basically always go back to the organ that I, almost like Chinese medicine, it's very much like Chinese medicine. And so basically, I look at the energy centers, I look at it for every chakra. So if you're getting a lot of headaches, I would look at what's happening with like, where in your head, you're getting the headaches, and then I would give you either the crown chakra tea or even the root chakra tea because they're very connected. So it's really, I don't know, our website sort of explains everything. But our mission really is to create connections around wellness and the ceremony of wellness. And so I would definitely say that as a category definitely. We have chakra teas that are very functional. I have herbal teas that are extremely functional. And then I just have amazing teas that come from the fresh harvest teas that come from special farms that I've been connected with for years. And those are considered medicinal, but not because green tea fights cancer cells. I mean, it's just proven. Just thousands of studies, black tea helps with heart health, proven. Thousands of studies, (inaudible) is for immunity and detoxification of the liver, proven. We have a section on our website, it's the science behind magic. Every single tea, flower, herb, spice and tea leaf itself is medicinal. So you can really look at all tea as functional, those they do in Asia.

Yeah, that's great. Yeah. What do you find your people buying your tea, is it mostly online?

Yeah, we are about 99% online. And we have a tea salon up here in Ohio, and then we'll be opening more tea salons. But yeah, we're a two year old company, and we're almost as big as Zhena's Gypsy Tea was after 10 years.

Wow.

So you've built other businesses, you've been in this--

Just Zhena's Gypsy Tea, and then I became a publisher at Simon and Schuster. I published Kiss the Ground, and I published a lot of ecological books. It was my publisher, I told her that my investors inspired me so she hired me on the spot. And so I got to be a publisher for four years, which was really fun. I'm in New York, living in Ojai and really passionate about books. And so a lot of our boxes will have an author, will host it, and we'll do like an online, we have online book clubs for the tea and stuff like that. So I got to really combine it all. But yeah, tea is definitely Zhena's Gypsy Tea, these are my two. The two businesses that I've started.

As an entrepreneur, what can you offer new entrepreneurs through your experience?

Well, being naive is really a gift. Because if you know what it takes, you're not going to do it. The question when I lost my last company to the investors, I walked away with nothing and I put my heart and soul into it for 15 years. And so what happened after that is I was like, never doing that again. I was like the scorned entrepreneur. But then I realized, I was like, well, I can't not do it because all I want to do is make tea. Like every day I was in my kitchen, all my friends were calling me like, the tea is not as good anymore. I'm like, alright, I'll blend you some raspberries. So it was like, it never went away, it was like I was missing a limb. But what the difference was with this one is in the beginning before I even had a name I said, what would it look like to get paid to be myself every day? What would that look like? And it was like, okay, what do I love? What am I? I make tea. Okay, I'm getting paid to make tea. I love it. Incense. Okay, I'm gonna have incense. I love books. Okay, we're gonna have books. I love perfume. We're making a perfume line right now. So all of a sudden, the more stuff I wanted to do, like our audience exploded, and then I would be goofy and make people laugh. I cuss a lot, and I'm really clumsy. So in our advertising videos, my editor was like, I'm not going to edit the good parts of you out anymore. He's like that, because I want people to know who you really are. So I was like, all right, fingers crossed. Went out. And then it was like, everyone's like, oh, my God, you're so relatable. I'm like, yeah, I'm super clumsy. Everyone knows that. And yeah, so I would say for entrepreneurs, what would it look like just to be yourself every single day, don't jump in and try to start a trend unless it's authentic to what you would do every single day, and be stoked about, and be thrilled to be doing. Everyday, I wake up excited. I've never had this sensation. Like I did with gypsy tea, but then when we got in the grocery stores, it was so hard. I was basically like pushing paper. If you want to kill me, give me paperwork. I would say like really focusing on what you would want to buy because you are your target market. When I was coaching a lot of business owners in between businesses, it was like, that was a hard thing for people to realize. It's like no, no, what you want is what people will want. If you really, really, really want something, trust me, thousands of other people will too, and then make that. And I think that's the best advice I can give yourself.

I think that's great, just be yourself.

Yeah, no, no, I have a new jewelry line coming out. Oh yeah. Earrings? Hello. My family's Roma gypsy, I'm like, yeah, earrings all day long. So for me, the jewelry is being made right now, and I've been drawing these totally random terrible drawings, some terrible artists, but I have all these great illustrators that fix everything for me. So I've been drawing all the designs, they're making them all so they'll be here by Valentine's Day. Details and new tea strainers that have gemstone and crested handles. I have tons of stuff coming in. A new perfume line I'm working on right now, bodycare--

You are busy. I would love it if listeners and people watching this podcast find your product?

clubmagichour.com.

clubmagichour.com. And they can find everything that you do there?

Yeah, we have a hub.

It's like a little internet there, join, login--

Yeah, we have a membership site too, and the astrology collection is starting now.

What do you get from membership?

We have a monthly subscription box and they get my creations first, and then I teach classes, every box has a theme. So right now, we just launched the gemstone collection for 2022 and the astrology collection. So every month, like this month, we have Garnet and Capricorn come out. And then next month will be Amethyst and Aquarius, then we have Pisces and Aquamarine. So I'm teaching classes on different meditations and different astrology. It's so fun. When you're having fun--

So here's a question for you, because under what you just said, you define success for me, but I'd love to hear how you define success.

Well, definitely being profitable, because Zhena's Gypsy Tea was never very profitable. Because we had all these middlemen, which was terrible. So now, I'm getting the tea from the garden. I'm blending it here in Ojai, and then I'm shipping it directly to my customers. So we're actually making enough money to pay out of our cashflow to make the jewelry, and to make the new tea towels, and the new housewares. So what I love about that is that it's successful because we're actually able to make more beautiful things. And we don't have investors.

Not getting investors is a success for you.

Yeah, I bought out (inaudible), put in 150,000. I bought them out this year with a 40% return.

Congratulations.

Amazing.

We improve very fast. We have about 14,000 monthly members by the tea. What's the most fun is creating things knowing they'll love that.

How did you grow your membership so quickly?

Yeah, no, I'm making things I want, and there's a lot of us.

It's a beautiful product.

It is. it is. I just know that growing a membership and growing a community is a challenging task.

I think for us, it was people relating to needing more self care. I teach tea ceremony every week as a form of meditation, and it's like it's got motion to it, and it's really beautiful, and you can do it in five minutes. So I think people need a meditation they could adapt to, and I say it's like meditation for people who can't meditate. But then it's also like, oh, guess what, tea cleans your intestinal tract and helps you produce more serotonin, and will make you feel great. And everybody's like, oh, my God, oh, it does and it works. And then they start realizing, oh, my health is actually in my hands. I have lung tonic teas, and I have nervous system teas, and they can be in charge of their health. And so we get like hundreds of letters every week of people saying like, my IBS is gone, my headaches are gone. Oh, my god, thank you so much. It's shocking to them, but in Asia, it's normal. Tea and herbs? Like that's how you take care of yourself. But here, we put our power in doctors. And thank God for doctors, but we've put our power of our health into other people and it's actually ours to be had. And so my grandmother really taught me that. We'd get a cut and she'd slap bread on it, and then give us a bunch of herbs and we'd be fine. I think that's why it grew, the membership, is that people were excited that they could actually enjoy something still lovely that brought them so many benefits.

It's great, and how rewarding like to see people with those coming to you saying, I have this and this, and then finding--

I don't. Basically, I say, you always have to find out from your doctor if it's okay, but you have to be really careful with the FDA and all that. But folkloric-ly, you can use these, and this is what's been used for thousands of years, and then they realize like, oh, my god, this really does help because it's fortifying the system instead of just fixing its symptoms. Yeah, that's that's a key

Wow.

All about your herbs, and your tea's, and your aromatherapy.

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.