A THOUGHTFUL PROCESS
Our actions are guided by our preference for simplicity over processing, and our trust in what nature has built over millennia of human history. Our extraction process is designed to be as gentle as possible on the herb itself. Often, our finished extracts contain just the herb extractives and the liquid used to extract them. It’s a thoughtful process with a simple result: high-quality herbal extracts.
At present, we have facilities for manufacturing herbal and plant extracts, capsules, tablets, powder blending, syrups, drops, liquid extracts, powder extract, paste, and soft gels. The company’s current production capacity per year is 400 tons of herb extracts, 10,000,000 syrups, and 100,000,000 tablets. Overall quality control can be fulfilled together with our standard laboratory.
Quality extracts begin with quality herbs. Growing our own herbs (more than 65 species of them) is one way to ensure we have the control we need. We know exactly how to grow herbs and when to harvest them so that the desired phytochemicals are concentrated in the plant part we collect. There are some herbs that our region doesn’t lend itself to growing. Maca, for example, does best in the high altitudes of the Andes of South America. When we can’t grow an herb ourselves, we source it ethically from responsible growers and wildcrafters. We prefer to use cultivated sources, when possible, as they reduce the strain on wild plant populations, but there are instances when wildcrafting is the best way to obtain an herb. Our search for ethically sourced herbs, both cultivated and wildcrafted, has taken us to every continent on the planet, except Antarctica.
TESTING, TESTING AND MORE TESTING
We’re unapologetically meticulous about making sure every herb and every extract meet our rigorous specifications. We take seriously our commitment to creating consistent, high quality products. We verify the identity of 100% of our herbs, whether we grow them or source them. We also subject the herbs we grow, and every lot of herbs we obtain from our partners, to testing based on basic criteria and an herb-specific risk assessment. When creating our extracts, we’re careful to use only those parts of a plant that contain the highest concentrations of the sought-after phytochemicals. In some cases, we extract the whole plant, but in many more, we extract only a part of the plant – a root, a flower, a leaf. To confirm that each herb consists of the right plant part we begin with a macroscopic evaluation of its morphological features. Then as needed, we go a step further and run microscopic analysis.
To verify that a plant meets our quality specifications, we check the plant’s sensory profile (what it looks, smells and tastes like) through organoleptic analysis. We have a testing program for heavy metals and pesticide screening, which includes pesticides, fungicides, miticides and herbicides. We test for microbiological contamination, and we evaluate for foreign materials, which can include unwanted parts of the plant. For example, we may reject a batch of a plant’s leaves if it contains too much connected stem. Once the extracts are made, we do more testing. We do organoleptic analysis and high performance thin layer chromatography (HPTLC) analysis to verify the quality and reconfirm identity of the extract. These tests are then crosschecked against phytochemical standards, botanical reference materials and previous batches of the extract to ensure we are producing a consistent product. For us, precision is a way of life. So, as needed, we do even further testing.