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Our Story
Sourcing, conservation, the people who grow and collect, and what happens to the packaging afterwards. This page states which of our commitments are in force and which are still only intentions.
Responsibility
Some are cultivated. Some are dug out of forest and scrub by people paid by weight, from populations nobody is counting.
The usual response is a page of round numbers and a photograph. Nothing has been manufactured and no raw material has been bought, so every figure we could publish today would be one we invented.
How to read this page
Each commitment below carries a status line. “Stated policy” means a decision we have made and will be held to. “Aspiration” means we intend it and have not yet done anything that proves it.
Nothing on this page describes a programme that is running, because none is.
Our obligations
Sourcing
Wild collection is not automatically the more natural option. For several herbs it is the more damaging one: collection is unregulated in practice, roots are taken faster than populations recover, and the person doing the collecting is usually the worst-paid participant in the chain.
Our position is that cultivated material is the default, and that wild collection needs a justification specific to the herb rather than a marketing preference for the word wild.
Status
Stated policy. No purchase has yet been made under it.
Identity
Substitution of a cheaper botanical for an expensive one is common enough in this trade to be assumed rather than suspected, and it is a sourcing problem before it is a laboratory one. No amount of downstream testing corrects for the wrong plant.
Verification of botanical identity is the first check in our testing programme, and the one we would refuse a consignment over.
Status
Designed. Applies from the first consignment purchased.
Growers
Most herbal supply reaches a brand through aggregators, which is efficient and makes the grower invisible. A company that cannot name its supply chain cannot make any credible claim about the conditions inside it.
We intend to buy through relationships we can describe: a named supplier, a known growing region, and a price we are willing to publish alongside the market rate.
Status
Aspiration. No supplier agreement is in place.
Packaging
Herbal actives degrade in light, oxygen and moisture. The materials that protect them most reliably are usually multi-layer laminates, which are among the hardest to recycle. Glass recycles well and adds weight to every shipment. Compostable films perform poorly as barriers and require collection systems most of our customers will not have.
We have not resolved this, and we are not going to describe whichever compromise we eventually make as an environmental achievement.
Status
Unresolved. The trade-off will be published with the decision.
A worked example
Shatavari — Asparagus racemosus — is heavily used and under conservation pressure. The part used is the root, so harvesting removes the plant, much of the trade is wild-collected, and the volumes are not recorded.
High demand, destructive harvest, no reliable count. Cultivation is the responsible route, but a certificate saying “cultivated” is easy to obtain and hard to verify where wild and farmed material meet in an aggregator’s warehouse.
We have not solved that, so we have not formulated with it. Our monograph says the same.
The test
A commitment that costs nothing to make and nothing to keep is not a commitment. It is a sentence.
Four commitments, six things not done. That ratio is the accurate description of a company at this stage, and printing it the other way round would be the cheapest possible way to lose the argument this page is making.
Where we fall short
This list is longer than the one above it, and it should be. It will shorten as the company begins operating, and each item will be replaced by evidence rather than by a claim that the work is under way.
Awaiting publication
We publish no environmental or social performance data.
There are no operations to measure. Nothing has been bought, nothing has been made, and no grower relationship has been agreed.
Each line below is replaced by a figure, an audit or a contract once there is a real supply chain behind it, and by nothing at all until then.
Corrections
If you work in herbal supply, conservation or packaging and something on this page is naive, outdated or simply mistaken, we would rather hear it than publish it for another year.