EXTRACTING CEDAR BEAR’S ROOTS

As Autumn moves in, a more reflective mood sets the tone. The height of summer slips away and the golden tones of the sun shift and mellow. Likewise, it is a wonderful time for introspection, which leads me to an interview Carl and I recently sat for with our Director of Business Development and resident writer. 

She picked our brains about the origins of Cedar Bear, from the company name to how we fell in love and started a business together. Read on for the remarkably unconventional story of how Cedar Bear became the company it is today AND what we have in store for the future!

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The story of Cedar Bear parallels the story of Jhoane and Carl. Without their intellect, thirst for deep spiritual awareness, and delightful eccentricities, Cedar Bear would cease to exist. 

Sparked by Carl’s inquisitive and innovative nature and fueled by Jhoane’s love of research and quest for universal healing, Cedar Bear has all the makings of a wildly successful endeavor. Add in a management staff of industry professionals and dedicated herbalists who collectively offer lifetimes of knowledge and experience, and you get the picture.

Cedar Bear is serious about delivering the highest quality, most effective alcohol-free liquid remedies this world has ever seen, and I am here to tell you about just how it came to be, with a cup of herbal tea in hand. 

Her-story

Growing up on Mercer Island in Washington State, Jhoane was no stranger to the natural world. However, there was a strong divide between plants and medicine in the household of her youth. Her father was an esteemed physician, and allopathic medicine was the only medicine recognized in their family. As Jhoane says, “Volunteer plants were weeds meant to be plucked, there was never a thought of plants being medicine.” 

So, she found other ways to explore the nature around her, swimming and water skiing on Lake Washington and horseback riding among her favorites. An avid horseback rider, she excelled in the equine world. Through her youth and into her young adult years she trained Arabians and successfully showed in the U.S. and Canadian Arabian circuit and the Nationals in both countries, quite an accomplishment at a time when amateur champions such as herself were just beginning to championship rank amongst seasoned professionals. During the winters, she would trade her water skis for mountain snow skis, and not surprisingly, she quickly mastered the slopes too. 

Jhoane was accepted to Brigham Young University right out of high school. She eagerly made the move to Utah where she started as a music major and switched to music theater. She married while in college and after college she spent several years in Portland, Oregon and the Bay Area of California before settling in Utah for good.

True to her proposed career path, Jhoane worked successfully as a SAG day actress while having a family. It was only after conceiving 5 children in 5.5 years (yes, there were twins!) that she slowed down her acting-performing career to ramp up parenthood while becoming an acting instructor & coach. 

Years later, when she amicably parted ways with her first husband and became a single mother, she began to see a new life emerging for herself. She took yoga teacher training. She became the first woman in Utah to become a level 3 Reiki Master. She immersed herself in these skills as she studied Tibetan healing and other ancient wisdoms. 

Little did she know at the time, all of these paths were leading her to Carl.   

His-story

Growing up in rural Utah, Carl always had a close connection with the ancestral land surrounding him. He had a profound fascination with the natural world around him. He went to New Zealand as a young adult in the early 1970s, where he was provided the opportunity to study under a traditional Maori healer and spiritual teacher, a Tahunga, who imparted ancient teachings of his people and culture. 

Upon returning from New Zealand to Utah, he started a family, worked, and decided to explore an academic foundation in herbalism, which led him to Emerson College of Herbology. A school founded in Canada in 1888, Carl was lucky to have attended and learned under some incredible herbal masters before they closed their doors in 1989. 

Fortified with this knowledge and his innate ability to formulate, in the mid 1980s Carl acquired a therapy clinic on a medical plaza and built-up a private herbal apothecary. He formulated dried herb infusions and decoctions, custom blended for his clients. At one point his apothecary held over 300 single, dried herbs, many of which he had sustainably wildcrafted or grown and harvested himself. 

The outpouring of support he received from 100% of his clients reporting positive results after following his herbal protocols gave him the inspiration to lean further into formulation of herbal blends, specifically shelf-stable liquid products. 

The TinctTract© Was Born!

Drawing from ancient alchemical principles, astute observations of existing liquid herbal-making methodologies, and conceptualizing his own take on alchemy over prior years, Carl created his revolutionary process as a cottage endeavor in 1982. From his studies, he knew that alcohol denatures and renders inert certain constituents that are beneficial to the body, many that are extracted for, so he set about to create a totally alcohol-free alchemic-based process that would be potent, shelf-stable, taste good, and be more effective. 

He named it the TincTract® process, condensing the words TINCture and exTRACTion, as the process he had developed was different and more effective than anything yet done in the world of liquid herbal dietary supplements, up until that point. 

He began slowly, starting in the kitchen with simple yet effective formulations to keep his children healthy. The following year, he was approached to formulate an herbal blend that would become his first commercial formulation, Herbal Minerals. From there, the rest is history.

Kid’s Formulas from the Cottage Kitchen to the Laboratory

“Children can’t be placebo fooled. It either works or doesn’t!” Carl exclaims to me. He goes on to explain that when you give a child a formula for an acute ailment, they are going to tell or show you that they feel better or they don’t. It’s that simple.

The first herbal formulas Carl developed for children using the early TincTract® cottage kitchen process were highly efficacious yet surprisingly simple. Based on the dried herbal blends he had been working on at his clinic, he used combinations of just 3-5 herbs, yet he was seeing fantastic results due to the TinctTract© extraction method he had devised. And the best part was,, they were 100% alcohol-free, making them completely safe for his children to take. 

The first fully marketwide available line of complex formulas for children was developed in the late 1980s. These formulas were so successful when brought to market that they remain the basis for many of the classic Cedar Bear Children’s Formulas available today. 

Perhaps most notable is the Respir-Moisten. This formula is significant because it was the first commercially available herbal formula made specifically for dry respiratory conditions and dry, hacking coughs. Many herbalists and companies had combinations with wild cherry bark for wet coughs and respiratory congestion problems, but no one had ever done a dry cough formula until then. Carl’s Dry Cough formula was the first!

These are formulas from the original children’s line that have stood the test of time:

• Respir-Dry™ (for Wet Coughs) - originally Wonderful Wild Cherry for Wet Coughs™, for wet, gunky coughs, runny noses, and sore throats

• Respir Moisten™ (for Dry Coughs) - originally Magnificent Mullein for Dry Coughs™, soothes and hydrates dry, irritated respiratory tissues, scratchy throats, and upset tummies 

• Seasonal Support™ - originally Cold Plus™ - for colds, sniffles, and to soothe acute fevers. 

• Tummy Ease™ - a ginger-based formula for nausea and gas

• Immune Booster for Children - using the more gentle Echinacea purpurea

• Herbal Laxative for Children - a gentle non-purgative formula for children

• Intestinal Cleanse - originally Parasite Cleanse for Children, protects and clears kids’ intestinal tracts, benefits the digestive system

Herbal Minerals Celebrates 40+ Years!

Soon after Carl perfected the TincTract© process, he was approached by a midwife to formulate a liquid herbal blend to raise and hold blood calcium levels in pregnant women. That formulation became Herbal MInerals, a Cedar Bear best seller to this day. It came to be used by midwives in the Upper Midwest, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and in the western states of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and Idaho. Herbal Minerals was Carl’s first commercially available formula. 

Now celebrating 40+ years, Herbal Minerals is a key component in the Cedar Bear Premium Line. 

• Herbal Minerals - Packed with vital plant-based minerals, it aids in the digestive system uptaking minerals from foods we eat, and maintaining the strength and integrity of bones, muscles and connective tissues, promoting overall structural health. 

A Love Story for the Ages

A simple twist of fate brought Jhoane and Carl to each other. They met by way of a local herb shop. Jhoane was looking for alternative remedies to help one of her children whom the allopathic medical system was failing. After explaining her son’s situation to the store attendant behind the counter, the attendant said, “I’ve got a guy for that. He may seem unorthodox, but I have a feeling he’ll know just what to do.”

Jhoane and her son met with Carl soon after, and he was indeed able to help. Carl also happened to be a newly single parent himself. Over time the meetings turned to picnics, and the conversations turned more personal. At first, the two discussed working together, melding his skills as an herbalist and therapist with her skills in yoga and reiki. However, these picnics began to blur the lines, until not only was Jhoane’s son experiencing deep healing, but so were Jhoane and Carl's hearts.  

They were married in 1993 in a beautiful gathering surrounded by their blended family of 11 children. Yes, Jhoane and Carl know about ‘super-parenting!’ 

They did indeed become fast business partners as well, working together in an integrative health and therapy setting.

All the while Carl was formulating his TincTracts© and Jhoane was studying herbs on a spiritual and academic level. Her interest in herbs led to extensive research which blossomed into published articles and technical papers through her love of writing. 

They officially began Cedar Bear Naturales, from a former iteration Carl had an interest in, as a joint venture in 1993, a natural blending of their strengths and intentions for the world.

“What’s in a Name?”

A time comes in every company’s conception when a name must be chosen. 

In the case of Cedar Bear, it was bestowed upon Carl as a native name by a close spiritual teacher of the Native American tradition. 

The cedar tree is sacred to the native people of North America, used medicinally and spiritually for cleansing, protection, and smudging. The bear is considered the protector of root medicine. In Northwestern traditions it is the bear who brought healing to the people. 

Jhoane and Carl were invited to a native gathering of friends and families at a mountain retreat camp. It was here that Carl received the name of ‘Cedar Bear,’ however he questioned being named a ‘bear.’ 

The next day it was Carl’s turn to lead a group of small children on a walkabout. On their way back down the hillside to camp Carl noticed a large patch of mountain thimbleberries. He wasted no time encouraging everyone to get down on their hands and knees and paw through the patch, enjoying the rare treat until their faces were stained with berry juice and bringing handfuls down the hill with them to share with everyone. 

Upon their return, the group facilitator laughed, nodded at Carl, and said, “Seeing such small berries that most would not see, and then gathering and eating berries, and you’re not a bear?” 

Cedar Bear was most certainly the right name, and Carl agreed it was.

“We Make the Impossible Possible”

When Carl first introduced his totally alcohol-free TincTract® products, there were doubts about its efficacy by colleagues and others who had not yet tried it. They claimed it was impossible to make strong and effective herbal products using only glycerin without alcohol. Yet, Cedar Bear had done it!

As Jhoane and Carl like to say, “At Cedar Bear, we do impossible well!”

Jhoane, Carl, and the entire team of employees and herbalists working with Cedar Bear aspire to reach as many people as possible with 100% alcohol-free liquid remedies that truly work.

The Future is Bright!

Change is good. Innovation is better. Jhoane and Carl have proven over the decades that they are on the cutting edge of herbal medicine at every turn. Their dedication is fierce and undeniable. Their ability to listen to their customers and innovate to meet their needs is astounding.

As you can see, Cedar Bear is always up to something new! Stay apprised of our innovations by subscribing to the newsletter HERE.

(These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are  not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.)

Written by Aubrey Loretta Connelly