From Foraging to Cup: How Our Tisanes Travel from the Himalayas to You
Before it’s a warm drink in your hands, every Nima Goos Goos tisane starts somewhere much less comfortable: a remote hillside in Ladakh, often at an altitude and in weather that would make most people turn back.
Here’s what actually happens between the mountainside and your cup.
It Starts With Three Women and a Shared Idea
Nima Goos Goos was founded by three women from Ladakh who wanted to put the region’s ingredients — and its traditional knowledge — in front of a wider audience, without losing what made them special in the first place. The company took shape after its founders met through the Naropa Fellowship in 2019, united by the same idea: that Ladakh’s herbs deserved a proper place on the global market, prepared with respect for how they’d always been used.
That idea is still the whole business, just larger now.
The Search Happens on Foot
Long before anything is packaged, someone has to find it. Our Chief Product Officer, Padma Angmo, spends her time trekking through remote regions like Martselang and the Shang valley — areas known for high-quality wild rhubarb, nettle, wild cumin, and other native herbs. This isn’t sourcing done from a supplier list; it’s finding the right patch of nettle growing at the right altitude, in person, often far from any road.
That on-the-ground knowledge — which slope catches the right sun, which season to harvest in, which plants are at their best — comes from years of trekking and farm life in the Himalayas, not a spec sheet.
Hand-Plucked, on Purpose
Everything we sell is hand-plucked rather than machine-harvested. It’s slower, and it doesn’t scale the way industrial farming does — but it means each leaf, root, or flower is picked with some judgment behind it, at the right point of ripeness, without damaging the plant or the land it grows on.
From there, our herbs are naturally dried and prepared with:
- No added preservatives
- No added flavour
- No unnecessary processing
What reaches your cup is close to what grew on the hillside — not a reconstructed version of it.
Why That Matters Beyond the Product
Foraging by hand, at a small scale, isn’t just a flavour decision. It’s tied to who benefits from the harvest. Working directly with local farmers and foragers in Ladakh means the people who know this land best — and have relied on it for generations — are part of the process, not left out of it.
It also means we’re not stripping the landscape for volume. Herbs like nettle and wild rhubarb keep growing in the same remote valleys, season after season, because they’re harvested the way they always have been.
The Last Step Is Yours
Everything up to this point — the trekking, the hand-picking, the natural drying — happens before a single packet reaches your door. The last step, the actual steeping and sipping, is where our part ends and yours begins.
If you’d like to read more about the people behind it, our Our Story page introduces the team. Or, if you’d rather start with the tea itself, our Shop is a good place to meet Ladakh one cup at a time.
