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Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory – Boulder

Serving 1.6 billion cups of tea per year, Celestial Seasonings is North America’s biggest manufacturer of herbal teas. Their tea factory is located in the Gunbarrel neighborhood of Northeast Boulder. The company, established more than 40 years ago, has only one mission:

to provide delicious, high-quality teas that are good for their customers and good for the world.

Celestial Seasonings is a world-famous tea factory, with free factory tours throughout the year. The Tea Shop has every flavor of tea they make, plus plenty of Celestial swag. On-site dining is available for breakfast and lunch at the Celestial Cafe. Enjoy light, nutritious home-cooked meals.

Natural Tea produced in Boulder

The iconic Sleepytime Tea Bear had very humble beginnings. Back in 1969, a visionary group of herb-knowledgeable entrepreneurs started blending natural herbs in a small Boulder barn. Like-minded people Mo Siegel, John Hay, Peggy Clute, and a few more others, started gathering herbs in the Boulder mountains to make their very first blend of tea.

It was also in the succeeding years that the herbal tea category was defined when they started selling herbal teas in hand-sewn muslin bags. The company’s name was inspired by one of its co-founders, named Lucinda Ziesings. All their ingredients were sourced from the area’s forests and fields.

This calming blend of hand-harvested chamomile, spearmint, and lemongrass was sold in 1969 through local health food stores. Today it boasts its own Wellness line of eight different Sleepytime varieties.

Helping the Whole World Unwind!

The idealistic founders of Celestial Seasonings were determined to find success, but not at the expense of peaceful and harmonious coexistence with the planet. Forty-five years later, the singular shared vision sustains one of the largest specialty tea manufacturers in North America, serving 1.6 billion-plus cups of tea annually, crafted from more than 100 different ingredients from over 35 countries.

Factory Tours on Sleepytime Drive

Celestial Seasonings offers free 45-minute factory tours that run every hour and comprise of a short video introduction and a 30-minute long walking tour throughout the factory. Complimentary guided tours take you into the working factory, multiple times every day. Every visitor gets the chance to see the behind-the-scenes, everything from making teas to packaging them.

Go on the weekdays to view the factory while the workers are busiest. If you catch it on a weekday you’ll see the factory in operation, blending, packaging, and shipping products. Tours are first-come, first-served for walk-in guests with reservations required for any non-family group of 8 or more.

See how everything comes together, from fresh ingredients to finished tea. Children 5 and up are allowed to tour the factory. All ages are welcome in the Tour Center.

All teas are available for tasting at the sampling bar and visitors are always welcome to stop in and try new blends without touring the facility. While on the property, enjoy a meal and some great art at the Celestial Café, open for breakfast and lunch Monday through Friday.

Other onsite attractions such as their Mint Room, Celestial Herb Garden, and Tea Shop are also open for daily tours. The Celestial Café, located in East Boulder’s Gunbarrel neighborhood, offers hearty breakfast and lunch meals and many beautiful works of art.

Specialty Seasonings – Popular Products

Aside from the USA and Canada, their teas are sold in many countries via their international distributors.

Furthermore, the flavors can be floral, fruity, minty, rich & earthy, spicy, or sweet. Their teas are sold in various forms, like bag, bottled, concentrate, and k-cup, while also being marketed to satisfy different moods:

• Feel Better
• Treat Yourself

2014 brought the launch of Organic, Fair Trade Certified™ Estate Teas sold exclusively at Whole Foods Market®. Hand-selected tea leaves are sourced from some of the world’s finest tea gardens in Rwanda, China, and India.

Celestial Sustainability

Blending for a purpose, the Celestial Seasonings also gives back to the community by helping different charities and organizations based in Colorado, as well as around the world. Corporate social responsibility remains the foundational core of the Celestial Seasonings mission:

Doing business the right way by combining high-quality, sustainably produced products with responsible global citizenship.

These ideals are evidenced in the natural fiber, biodegradable, compostable, chlorine-free tea bags that deliberately lack strings, tags, staples, and individual wrappers. Tea boxes use 100% recycled paperboard, including 35% post-consumer waste.

The company’s botanicals purchasers deal directly with the farmers and communities that grow the products, allowing for the highest-quality ingredients while simultaneously providing economic benefits that remain within the communities. Many of the farming partners have supplied Celestial Seasonings for decades, operating in accordance with sustainable agricultural practices.

The Artist Behind the Box Art

We think our boxes are just as important as the goodness they hold, so we’ve always created beautiful packaging adorned with commissioned works of art and thoughtful, inspiring words.

If you have always wondered whom to thank for the beautiful eye candy featured on the vibrant tea boxes all these years, much of the gratitude goes to artist Jerry LoFaro. From his enduring relationship with Celestial Seasonings Tea, LoFaro created images for over 50 tea boxes, products, and tins .

Now that the holidays are nearly over for another year, put on the new slippers, snuggle in, and soothe your overworked nerves with Boulder’s most beloved sleepy bear.

Address: 4600 Sleepytime Dr, Boulder , CO 80301

Phone: 303-581-1202

Season: Year-round

Website: celestialseasonings.com

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Celestial Seasonings Tea Tours

• 4600 Sleepytime Dr., Boulder, CO 80301
• 303.581.1266
• Visit Website

Join us here in the beautiful foothills of Boulder, CO for a factory tour. From raw ingredients to finished products, you’ll learn all about the wonderful world of tea and see how our wholesome products are blended, packaged and shipped. You'll never look at tea the same way again! Our tour is $5 per person and takes 45 minutes to complete. After a short introduction in our theater, visitors enjoy a walking tour through our tea factory. Please see their website for important information about wheelchair accessibility, minimum age requirements, and tour restrictions. While you’re here, be sure to visit our Tea Shop, featuring Celestial Seasonings teas and gifts plus healthful foods and personal care products from the Hain Celestial family of brands. Details at https://celestialseasonings.com/pages/tea-tour

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Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory

Price & Hours

• Facilities 3.5
• Atmosphere 4.5

No wonder everyone in Boulder seems so relaxed: The city is home to North America's largest producer of herbal tea, which packages and sends more than 8 million tea bags every day. Founded in 1969, Celestial Seasonings has since grown to serve more than 1.6 billion cups of tea (including green, red, white and chai varieties) a year to consumers all over the world.

Recent visitors agree that a tour of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory is well worth the time, even if you're more of a coffee person. You'll get the chance to see the entire packaging process, not to mention the Celestial Herb Garden and the popular Mint Room, where the company stores giant bags of spearmint and peppermint tea. (Recent travelers delighted in the chance to see how long they can bear the powerful aromas before they need to step out for some fresh air.) Plus, you'll have the opportunity to sample some of the factory's best-sellers. If you're not already sold, keep in mind that the tour (and the tastings) is completely free.

Located in northeast Boulder –  adjacent to the Leanin' Tree Museum of Western Art   – the Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory welcomes tea lovers every day (hours vary depending on the day) with 45-minute tours running every hour on the hour between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. (between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. on Sundays). You can also simply pop in for a complimentary taste anytime between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Saturdays, and 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Sundays. For more information, check out the factory's website .

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Celestial Seasonings Restarts its Popular Tea Tour, Reopens Tea Shop in Boulder, Colo.

Celestial Seasonings , based in Boulder, Colo., had a grand reopening of its campus to visitors and tea enthusiasts for its popular tea tour. The tea tour officially resumed on Aug. 12, along with the reopening of the Celestial Seasonings Tea Shop on the property.

Coinciding with the 13th Annual Celestial Seasonings B Strong Ride , benefiting the Boulder Community Health Center for Integrative Care and other local cancer charities, the tea tour resumed as 700 cyclists started and finished their ride on the grounds of Celestial Seasonings headquarters.

Celestial Seasonings’ Newly Designed Facility

The newly designed Celestial Seasonings facility greeted visitors with captivating visuals and engaging displays that showcase the passion and innovation behind the tea-making process.

In fact, the 45-minute tea tour has been re-imagined as a multi-sensory experience that includes a walk through an art gallery that features more than 50 years of tea box art; complimentary tea samples at a tea bar with more than 90 tea varieties; and an up-close view of the factory, where eight million tea bags are produced daily.

"We are so pleased to welcome visitors back to our campus," said Tim Collins, general manager of Celestial Seasonings. “Whether you are a long-time fan or new to tea, we invite you to Celestial Seasonings. We like to say our teas are a little bit of magic in your mug.”

Guests on the tour also get an exclusive look – and get to experience the exhilarating scent – of the famous Mint Room, which has led many guests to exclaim, “I survived the Mint Room!” In addition, the tour features the Sleepytime Bear Cottage, a recreation of the Celestial Seasonings box artwork, offering a fun photo opp.

Fun Facts About Celestial Seasonings and Its Tea Tour:

• Historically, more than 140,000 visitors come through the Celestial Seasonings Tour Center each year, with about 2.1 million visits total.
• When running at full capacity, 500,000 boxes of teas are manufactured at the Celestial Seasonings Boulder, Colo. plant each day (around 10,000,000 tea bags).
• The top three Celestial Seasonings teas are Sleepytime, Chamomile and Peppermint.
• Celestial Seasonings’ Sleepytime brand tea is the No. 1 sleep tea (per Circana, MULO+C, latest 52 week data ending 7/30/23).
• Celestial Seasonings sources ingredients for its teas from 40 different countries and 10 U.S. states, with 70 percent of ingredients purchased directly from farmers and local communities.
• The Celestial Seasoning boxes are made with 100-percent recycled paperboard (including 35 percent consumer waste), and the company will soon be eliminating the plastic overwrap on the tea boxes. That will save around 160,000 pounds of plastic waste a year.
• Celestial Seasonings tea offerings currently feature stringless, tagless, stapleless and individual wrapper free tea bags – saving 3.5 million pounds of waste from entering landfills every year (calculation of the weight of string plus tag multiplied by the total number of teabags made).
• Unique to Celestial Seasonings is its iconic custom art commissioned for its boxes.
• Celestial Seasonings exports its teas to around 35 countries.
• 1.6 billion cups of Celestial Seasonings tea are served globally each year.
• Celestial Seasonings is America's first herbal tea company. In 1969, its first tea was created from herbs and botanicals foraged in the forests of the Rocky Mountains.

Celebrating 50 Years

Celestial Seasonings, Inc. (a subsidiary of The Hain Celestial Group ) has been creating teas for more than 50 years, and the brand currently offers more than 90 varieties of herbal, green, black, wellness, rooibos and chai teas. Each blend is crafted by the company’s blendmaster – all from the finest herbs, teas, spices and botanicals.

For more information on Celestial Seasonings, the tea tour or the tea shop, visit  CelestialSeasonings.com .

Don’t Miss the Weekly World Tea News eNewsletter! Get your free subscription, if you’re not already subscribed, by clicking here.

Plan to Attend or Participate in World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024

To learn about other key developments, trends, issues, hot topics and products within the global tea community, plan to attend World Tea Expo, March 18-20, 2024 in Las Vegas, co-located with Bar & Restaurant Expo . Visit WorldTeaExpo.com .

To book your sponsorship or exhibit space at the World Tea Conference + Expo, or to enquire about advertising and sponsorship opportunities at World Tea News, contact:

Ellainy Karaboitis-Christopoulos Business Development Manager, Questex Phone: +1-212-895-8493 Email: [email protected]

Also, be sure to stay connected with World Tea Expo on social media for details and insights about the event. Follow us on Twitter ,  Facebook ,  Instagram  and  LinkedIn .

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Tea Tours at The Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory

Tours are guaranteed on the hour for walk-in public. Maximum 45 people per tour. Tickets are first come, first served.

Website:  http://www.celestialseasonings.com/visit-us

Address: 4600 Sleepytime Dr, Boulder, CO 80301-3284

Contact: 303-530-5300

Hours for Tours: Monday through Saturday 10am to 4pm  Sunday 11am to 3pm

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Restaurants, food and drink, restaurants, food and drink | celestial seasonings herbal tea factories reopening boulder campus to public, the first-come-first-served tours will be $5 a person.

Boulder’s Celestial Seasonings is restarting its popular tea factory tours — though they will no longer be free — and reopening its gift shop to the public starting Aug. 12, according to a message on the company’s website .

Celestial Seasonings, located on Sleepytime Drive in a Gunbarrel neighborhood, stopped offering tours in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The gift shop and cafe also were closed to the public. It appears the cafe’s closure will continue.

The first-come-first-served tours will be $5 a person and take about 45 minutes, according to the website. Guests also are invited to visit the Tea Bar for complimentary samples of the company’s 100-plus tea varieties.

Tours are available during business hours, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Celestial Seasonings is closed Sundays and Mondays. Children under 5  are not allowed on the factory tour, while those under 15 must be accompanied by an adult.

Celestial Seasonings, which started in Boulder in 1969, merged with the Hain Food Group to become The Hain Celestial Group in 2000.

For more information, go to celestialseasonings.com.

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Celestial Seasonings’ Brings Back Tea Factory Tour. Now $5 Admission

Image: Depositphotos

Afterward, visit a tea sampling bar with more than 100 kinds of tea.

Do note that children must be age 5 or older to participate in the factory tour. Children under the age of 15 must be accompanied by an adult.

Other Important Details

Wheelchairs and walkers are welcome on the tour. Courtesy wheelchairs are available on a first come, first served basis.

Hairnets and beard nets (if applicable) are required to be worn at all times while in the factory and will be provided

Children under 5 years of age are not allowed on the factory tour

Children under 15 years of age must be accompanied by an adult

Service animals are not allowed in the factory

Outside food and beverages including candy, gum, and glass containers are not allowed on the factory floor

Photography/Video are not allowed on the factory tour

Personal items allowed on the factory portion of the tour are limited to a small bag such as a handbag or fanny pack and outerwear such as coats, vests, and sweaters.

Tours run year-round (except holidays) and depart hourly Tuesday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.

4600 Sleepytime Dr., Boulder, 303-581-1484.

Celestial Seasonings

4600 Sleepytime Drive Boulder , CO 303-581-1202

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Matador Original Series

How foraged colorado herbs kickstarted america’s love of herbal tea.

M y tour group is huddled around a yellow column in the Celestial Seasonings headquarters. We’re staring, mesmerized, at a painting hanging in front of us as our guide murmurs quietly behind us. This, she tells us with a hint of pride in her voice, is the original illustration of the iconic Sleepy Time bear, the unofficial Celestial Seasonings mascot that adorns its best-selling chamomile tea. We gasp. Nearly all of us have memories of seeing the Sleepy Time bear in the family cupboard.

My own memories are vivid. I regularly joined my godmother for lunch as a kid. A dedicated tea drinker, she always had a plate of cookies and a pot of hot water on the table when my mother and I arrived. I’d rummage through her cabinets, catching a whiff of Sugar Plum Spice (which at the time had ballet dancers on the box) and peppermint. But my favorites were always Lemon and Raspberry Zinger — the tart, citrusy flavor and the giant, juicy fruits floating on the boxes always made my mouth water.

Americans obsessed with work and productivity aren’t tea drinkers by nature — they need coffee to fuel their endless ambition. Yet Celestial Seasonings managed to tap into what we can embrace about tea: stability, peace, quiet, and family, even if only for a fleeting moment at the end of the day. After 50 years in business, Celestial Seasonings teas occupy a revered place alongside coffee in the cabinets of Americans from every background.

Celestial Seasonings’ branding has always suggested the presence of magic and fairytale lands where friendly animals come to life and giant lemons float through the sky like clouds. The same can be felt at the company’s headquarters in Boulder , which is open for tours. There is a kind of magic present at Celestial Seasonings — but it mostly has to do with nostalgia.

Before there was Sleepy Time, there were foraged herbs

Photo: DetskymodelingDotCz /Shutterstock

In 1969, Mo Siegel was a teenager living in Aspen, Colorado, and would often hang out at the local health food store. He spent his days hiking in the mountains and took an interest in the local plant life, including the fresh, fragrant herbs he crushed underfoot on his daily treks. It dawned on Siegel that he could make tea with the wild herbs growing in the mountains, so he began picking bunches, creating different combinations, and giving away the resulting blends.

Later that year, Siegel decided to relocate to Boulder, where his life carried on much the same way: He took hikes in the mountains and picked the herbs that he found along the way — rose hip, red clover blossoms, raspberry leaves. Except this time, Siegel decided that he wanted to sell his signature blends. He already knew where to get his herbs. The challenge would be to make his business official.

“When we first started doing this, herbal tea was very fringe,” explains Tim Collins, vice president of marketing at Celestial Seasonings. “In fact, we had to create and name the category ‘herbal tea’ in this country. Elsewhere in Europe, they had similar offerings called tissanes or infusions, but nobody in America knew what that meant at the time.”

Still, Siegel couldn’t be deterred from his dream. He knew a girl in Boulder named Lucinda — but all the men in town knew her as Celestial Seasonings. She was so beautiful, she was seasoned by heaven, they all said. Siegel had his company name. Next, he started thinking about how to package his product.

Seigel stamped muslin bags with circular hand-drawn designs — a red lightning bolt or a blue palm tree — and filled them with his hand-picked blends. In 1969, at the age of 19, Siegel officially founded the Celestial Seasonings tea company.

Once the company was on its feet, Siegel became eager to expand his repertoire of herbs. In 1972, he traveled to Mexico. In Sonora, he headed to a market selling herbs and dried plants. It was here that Siegel discovered tilia leaves, which have a calming, very mild sedative effect. He figured the woody, sweet cherry flavor would pair well with chamomile.

Siegel took the herb back to Boulder and embarked on a series of taste tests. Eventually, he landed on a combination of tilia leaves, chamomile, lavender, lemongrass, and orange blossoms. It was the perfect blend of herbs to lull tea drinkers into a peaceful snooze. The result of his experimentation is the now classic Sleepy Time tea.

Photo: Elisabeth Sherman

John Hay, one of the company’s co-founders, recruited his artist sister, Beth Underwood, to come up with a drawing to accompany the blend. She painted the Sleepy Time bear and his family in their cottage, thus shaping the way countless Americans viewed their bedtime tea.

Eventually, the muslin bags gave way to sturdier cardboard boxes, and accompanying illustrations became more complex, too: a bear in a life preserver paddling down a river in a container of blueberries, a wizard casting spells with his unicorn companion by his side, a princess clad in a red gown astride her tamed dragon. The characters on the company’s packaging have since become mascots for reluctant tea-drinking Americans.

Celestial Seasonings’ aesthetic is now famously psychedelic and whimsical. Genial animals and fruit rendered in vibrant colors splash across the labels, creating a fantastical universe imbued with magic, adventure, and benevolent animal companions. This is the place your daydreams take you while sipping a hot cup of tea.

Creating a market for tea in a non-tea-drinking nation

Photo: Celestial Seasonings

According to Collins, the market for herbal tea was “very small, fragmented” in the early ‘70s. One agricultural report published in 1971 found that Americans consumed just .75 pounds of tea every year, compared to the British, who drank around 8.5 pounds. The report goes on to say that while instant tea had been “virtually ignored for the past 20 years,” it began to gain popularity in 1970, the year after Siegel founded Celestial Seasonings. Yet until the 1980s, Americans remained intensely skeptical of herbal tea.

“The biggest challenge in the early stages was getting retailers to take a chance on a band of hippie founders from Colorado, peddling a radical new beverage that nobody had really heard of,” Collins says.

The company’s big break came in 1974, when actress Susan St. James appeared on The Tonight Show , which John Denver was guest hosting that night. She brought a pitcher of Celestial Seasonings’ Red Zinger tea with her to share with Denver. He took a taste and declared, “Red Zinger tea, far out!” Denver gave Celestial Seasonings a much-needed dose of good PR. With very little competition on the market, the tea company’s popularity boomed.

“In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Lipton dominated the tea category in America, and until their entry into herbal tea, we enjoyed nearly a 100 percent share of a much smaller herbal tea category,” Collins explains. “Celestial became the breakout and leading herbal tea brand very quickly.”

Collins insists that Celestial Seasonings maintained its success by focusing on tea that actually tastes good — the focus, hopefully, of every food and beverage company. Yet Siegel seemed to tap into something more appealing to Americans than taste. He saw that Americans wanted to feel comforted after a hectic day of work and raising a family, so he gave them the inverse of coffee — an antidote to the culture of overwork, exhaustion, and burnout that pervades American society.

It was an idea entirely separate from the British concept of tea. Focusing on blends inspired by plants Siegel originally foraged himself turned out to be a stroke of genius. The majority of Celestial Seasonings products, including Sleepy Time, are actually “herbal infusions” (and must be legally labeled as such) because they don’t contain any of the plant camellia sinensis , which makes teas like black and green tea. Americans responded to plant-based herbal teas that made no attempt to replace their precious caffeinated coffee.

What it’s like to visit the American classic today

The moment the tour begins, the scent of cinnamon invades your senses — earthy, spicy, and warm. Our tour guide, Evan, first led us through the section of the factory where the herbs (chamomile, hibiscus, lemongrass, and lavender) are stored in rooms separate from camellia sinensis — the black, green, and white tea leaves.

From there, we visited the mint rooms, which are closed-off spaces where peppermint and spearmint leaves are stored. The fragrance in these rooms is so pungent it makes your eyes water and your sinuses tingle; the subtle taste of alcohol, a little oily, might even linger on your tongue.

Photo: Elisabeth Sherman / Celestial Seasonings

Though the mint rooms are legendary, the factory floor is where the tour really peaks. Watching the endless conveyor belt of finished and wrapped boxes has a hypnotic effect. Glimpsing the Sleepy Time production line didn’t feel like the breaking of a spell. It was more like the big reveal at the end of the movie, when you find out the identity of the killer. It’s satisfying and clarifying, an answer to a long-held question.

Celestial Seasonings fully embraces its delightfully kitschy vibe. It embodies, through extremely well-executed marketing, what makes tea-drinking so appealing, even for Americans: Tea makes you feel safe and at home. At the end of the tour, I felt as though I had been hugged by an old friend.

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Attraction:

Boulder, Colorado : Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory Tour

Visitors issued a tea bag as a ticket, see the actual tea operations, and learn about the safety cordon surrounding the peppermint room. Tours still suspended due to Covid.

Celestial Seasonings Factory

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Visitor Tips and News About Celestial Seasonings Tea Factory Tour

Reports and tips from RoadsideAmerica.com visitors and Roadside America mobile tipsters . Some tips may not be verified. Submit your own tip .

We visited here today and totally loved it! The tour is free, and you can sample as much tea as you want! My favorite part was how amazing everything smelled. Every few feet you would smell another herb or plant used in their teas.

They had a special room with just tea leaves (so that the leaves wouldn't soak up the scents of the herbal infusions), and they had a peppermint room.

This place was spectacular. I loved every moment of it -- from the "tea-ket" ticket, to the mint room, to seeing the machinery. They have a great gift shop too. Definitely worth going out of your way to visit.

You walk right through the working factory while they are making teas and filling boxes. You also get to go into the "peppermint room," which remains sealed off so that the strong peppermint does not contaminate all other teas in the facility! It's a fun tour and the gift shop is great!

Wonder if the peppermint containment breach alarms ever go off....

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Celestial Seasonings© teas are an invitation to taste a world of flavor in every box. From relaxing herbal teas to energizing black teas and green teas to refreshing cold brew iced teas and everything in between, there’s a Celestial blend that’s perfect for any occasion.

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