HerbalEGram: Volume 10, Number 9, September 2013

Veteran members of the American herb industry were saddened to learn that Barry Meltzer, founder and owner of the San Francisco Herb & Natural Food Company, died on August 22, 2013. Barry was a longtime pioneer of the modern botanical industry. Established in 1969, his company was one of the oldest herb businesses in the United States and supplied bulk herbs, spices, tea ingredients, and tea blends to hundreds of customers around the world.

Barry was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, New York, to Ellie and Milton Meltzer. Both of his parents took an active role in Barry’s business in the early days by running an East Coast warehouse and distribution center and frequently accompanying him to trade shows and conferences. They were the only parents of any of my herb colleagues who I met on a consistent basis during the 1970s and ‘80s before their respective deaths.

During his last year, Barry was afflicted with a rare blood and bone marrow disease called myelodysplastic syndrome with atypical CML (chronic myelogenous, or myeloid, leukemia).

As industry veteran Caroline MacDougall — formerly of Celestial Seasonings and now president of her own company, Teeccino — wrote, “My professional relationship with Barry started in the early herbal renaissance days of the '70s when I was the buyer for Celestial Seasonings. Barry supplied us with some of the wild-harvested herbs from Appalachia where he had personal relationships with the collectors” (email, August 26, 2013).

As the herb industry was burgeoning in the mid-1970s, Barry was one of a group of herb company owners who founded the Herb Trade Association (HTA), a now-defunct trade organization created to develop standards for the herb industry and the predecessor of the American Herbal Products Association (AHPA). Meltzer was one of the first leaders of HTA, one of its “tri-presidents.”

“We were such a raucous group of 20-to-30-year-olds,” said MacDougall, “that we had to have a joint chairmanship of three people (Barry, myself, and Ben Zaricor of Fmali Herb, Inc.) because no one wanted any one person to hold all the power!”

Industry pioneer Drake Sadler, co-founder of herb tea company Traditional Medicinals (TM), recalled his earliest interactions with Barry in an email to friends and colleagues on August 23:

[T]he very early ‘70s success of Traditional Medicinals can be traced to our trusted friendship with Barry Meltzer. Through her small herb shop in Northern California, Rosemary [Gladstar, Drake’s original partner at TM] had established credit with SF Herbs, and when TM was launched, Barry provided tremendous support through the extension of raw materials, credit, and knowledge of the herb industry. He was as much a co-founder of the company as we were, and a few years ago when Lynda [Lemole] and I shared the stage, honored to receive a lifetime achievement award from AHPA, we asked Barry to step out of the crowd and join us … so meaningful and important was his early contribution!

Some of the only photographs from the infancy of HTA and its officers and Board of Directors were taken by Meltzer, who kept an unofficial archive of the organization. As Sadler said in his email, “Barry always had a camera in his hand, chronicling in black and white those early days of the industry … a time when hippies, Mormons, Appalachian fur traders/root gatherers, rowdy women from Boulder, Texas cowboys, organic farmers, and New York traders would gather together to envision the future. We rarely agreed but we all admired Barry.”

Pioneering San Francisco herbalist, aromatherapist, and author Jeanne Rose recalled Barry’s early relationship with Nathan Podhurst, the Russian-Jewish pharmacist who owned an herb shop in San Francisco called Nature’s Herbs:

When Nathan died, Barry, in his most excellent generous spirit, saved Nature’s Herbs’ formulas and combinations and even the exact look of the store. He built a place in his business that looked exactly like the Nature’s Herbs’ Store from San Francisco. If you walked in there you might have burst into tears as I did when I first saw it. It was an ode to a more gentle graceful time. Barry found a place for Emma [Nathan’s longtime assistant] in his own business. So for Emma, a new place that looked just like the old place was a great place to work. Barry was a kind and generous spirit whose kindness and love [were] not obvious to many — he worked quietly and helped many people (email, August 31, 2013)

Meltzer’s company carried a wide variety of herbs.

“I've relied on Barry to have the unusual herbs that no one else cares enough about,” MacDougall continued. “His company always had the widest diversity of any herb supplier in the US. I tend to use the unique tasting herbs and could go to Barry to find just the variety, for instance, of a particular type of birch bark that tastes like wintergreen. Everyone else would send me bland, tasteless birch bark, but not Barry. He knew the variety of Black Birch that has this tasty bark and he could find the right person to collect it for him.”

During the 44 years that Barry ran San Francisco Herb & Natural Food Company, he changed locations several times. His original herb shop was on Union Street. According to Denver food and drug law attorney Jim Prochnow, who did legal work for Meltzer in the past few years, as the specially prepared tea blends grew more and more popular, customers wanted larger quantities so a new location was chosen on Bluxom Street in 1975. In 1978, the processing part of the company was moved to Horton Street, in Emeryville, California. This warehouse was destroyed by the Loma Prieta Earthquake in 1989. A new location was established on 46th Street in Emeryville and business was conducted there until moving to the current Kato Road facility in 1995.

Prochnow noted that during the past year, while Barry was dealing with his life-threatening illness and regulatory problems related to his business, “he was a true warrior who did all he could to protect the business he founded in 1969, and, in difficult times, to preserve employment for as many employees that he could” (email, August 29, 2013.)

Sadler of Traditional Medicinals shared another interesting anecdote about when his company started to experience rapid growth:

We began buying herbs in large sacks from Barry and often the country of origin was printed on the sack. I knew Barry visited some of these supply areas and I began to ask him what it was like in the growing and collection regions. He would provide some description but always say something like ‘you should go see for yourself.’ In 1978, I went to Guatemala to see a lemongrass farmer but was very discouraged to see the horrible slave-labor-type conditions on the farms.

When I returned and saw Barry again, I told him that I was really conflicted with the poor working conditions I had found. Barry understood and explained that those conditions were prevalent almost everywhere the herbs came from, worldwide. I reminded him of my background in community service, and that I could not justify building a business whose success was dependent upon the exploitation of poor people.

Barry was quiet for a moment and then said to me in an unusual challenging voice, ‘If you don't like how the world is, change it! If you don't like how the herb business operates, find a new way to do business!’ That same message began to speak loudly in my head over the months ahead, and out of that conflict, the company's true purpose — the second part of its mission — emerged, and we have remained aligned with that mission for the last three decades (Sadler D. email to Meltzer K., September 2, 2013).

The feelings of many of Barry’s old friends are summed up by Sadler, who in this email to friends wrote, “How fortunate we were to pass this time with such a gentle man, pioneering brother, father, and husband. He knew our work with plants was noble, and I am grateful to have shared this sacred journey with him. Barry Meltzer’s spirit lives!”

Barry is survived by his wife of 30 years, Kristi, a daughter Skye, and three sons, Greg, Eli, and Kim (named for another herb industry pioneer, Kim Stern, of the former Green Mountain Herbs in Boulder, CO, who died in the 1980s).* Memorial services are scheduled for October 20, 2013, at St. Johns United Church in San Francisco (http://sfstjohnsucc.org/about/) from 3-5 pm PDT.

—Mark Blumenthal