Indigo Herbs is a company based in Glastonbury, there aim is to supply products that support a healthy lifestyle, enabling customers to pursue a journey towards wellbeing and a healthier lifestyle. The unique products will help support healthy eating habits and also induce healthy habits into your daily routine. One of the most popular products that Indigo Herbs supplies, are the ingredients to make your own organic chocolates. This product is something that Indigo Herbs is known for.

Indigo Herbs was a great place to have my work experience. It gave me the opportunity to learn about the unique business. Indigo Herbs is unique for its humble base but world- wide network and weird and wonderful products, some of which you could never guess were actually a thing. Additionally I learnt about products that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about. The atmosphere in the workplace was positive and there was a great work ethos. I felt honoured to be working as a part of a business that is continually growing towards reaching its goals, which are to sell in big brand supermarkets across the globe, while also spreading the healthy ethos to more and more people and continue to supply their great products all over globe. It really gave me a great feeling to be a part of the business and help create products that are potentially soon to be shipped half way around the world.

During the week I worked in the kitchen packaging up the products which gave me the opportunity to see the quality of the products giving implications of exactly how much care and effort that went into the creation of the of the produce. Some of the products I personally packed were, the shaman spirit tea, which included mixing the different plant matter together to get the tea blend, Maca powder, hemp protein and beetroot powder, which was extremely vibrant and potent. Others in the kitchen we’re packaging lots of different cacao products, for example Cacao butter, nibs, and powder. The different smells in the kitchen were incredible and the colours and textures of different produce were fantastic. I also worked in the stock room doing stock take and also ‘picking’ to find different products that had orders place for, so I rounded them up in order for them to be boxed up for dispatch through courier companies etc. The picking process shocked me as when looking at the orders I discovered the different locations that the products were being sent to and it really displayed to me how vast this home-grown business is. I was able to see most of the process in the building from the bulk product in the warehouse all the way through to it being dispatched as a finished product. I was surprised to discover that around 800-900 parcels are packaged each week, mainly due to the fact that for a warehouse that is relatively small in size when compared to major companies, and due to the size of the team who actually work in the manufacturing process at any one time for Indigo Herbs. To me this figure is amazing as it shows how well the team is able to function and get things done despite is small size and generally relaxed vibe around the manufacturing building.

Here I am doing stock checks, picking and labelling products that are to be distributed by Amazon.

Everyone that I had the pleasure of working with knew reams of information about Indigo Herbs and were always able to help and answer any questions I had about either what I was doing or about the company in general. Everybody there was motivated and dedicated to completing their given tasks, as a result of a hardworking team they are able to produce and dispatch thousands of products each week. I was able to talk to workers in different positions for example talking to people who primarily work in the kitchen packing the product or creating potions or tinctures. Gareth works in dispatch, production and customer service, he enjoys the variety of work and loves experimenting with the different herbs. Cameron works in the production department and he is often responsible for tinctures, incense and aromatherapy oils, he was an interesting and knowledgeable man, experienced in the workplace and enthusiastic about coming to work.

Christoff was my work experience supervisor for the week, he made my plan and always had something for me to do. He is the production & quality supervisor and was always extremely friendly and displayed great enthusiasm whenever he was around. Every day I would report to him and he’d set me up with a job task. Indigo Herbs has two separate buildings one contains the warehouse and is for manufacture and dispatch, while the second building which is with a mile radius of the other, is entitled as the media and marketing office.

From my work experience I have learnt a lot about the manufacturing process and about the company ethos. Before this week I hadn’t a clue about how they work to produce their products, where the order from, or who orders from Indigo Herbs themselves. However now I feel that I can truly express the message that this company is spreading about health and well-being, and have also took part in making produce which could be sent to customers in various locations across the globe.