NIE: According to the American Botanical Council’s Sustainable Herbs Program, sustainability is about producing herbal remedies “that are good for people and good for the environment” and involves taking steps to ensure that companies “are also working to sustain livelihoods and the earth.” Please discuss.
Swaroop: We are learning and using the traditional knowledge from older civilizations for herbal remedies. The approach has been looking at everything with our own lens. True sustainability can be reached only by making the people who have been practicing traditional medicine a part of the conversation and learning from their practices. Age-old practices of regenerative agriculture and sustainable use of resources help sustain the livelihood of local communities and keep earth fertile. The saffron farmers in La Mancha, Spain, store the harvest and use it as currency for their major expenses like wedding or house construction. However, high demand pressure is eroding the tradition and driving farmers to other crops.
Another angle is to look at the effects of removing traditional food crops from communities for use as herbal remedies. A classic example is maca from Andes where overharvesting and resulting replacement with other food have resulted in food insecurity and health deterioration. If we are in the business of health, how can we ignore the health of growers?
Technology has provided us with unprecedented tools. We can use AI and ML (machine learning) tools to analyze what sustained civilization before us and what needs to be done to keep the growth.
NIE: In a related question, and this one for manufacturers, how would you define “sustainable nutrition,” and how does this goal factor into what products or formulas you develop?
Swaroop: Sustainability goes beyond agriculture, processing, and manufacturing.
Good health depends on self-care. Self-care needs to be affordable for the masses—if the average consumer can afford $1 or $30 per month—a suitable supplement should be available at that price point to make it sustainable.
Compliance is a major factor in nutrition. If someone takes a vitamin, the most effective way is to do it at a fixed time every day. There are delivery formats which make compliance unsustainable. It is not feasible for someone to pop four pills to reach an effective dosage of >1 g / day. The loading variance of some dosage formats like gummies might make them unsustainable in the long run.
Designing a supplement for genders and ages might present sustainability challenges. Classical examples are sports nutrition, probiotic, digestive health products for men, women, and older populations.
What about supplement packaging? Why can’t we make personalized containers for supplements and ship pills in paper bags with expiry stickers?
We have realized that women decide about self-care for their family. Not making our communications centered on women and listening to them is unsustainable.
NIE: According to the 2021 Global Sustainability Survey by Simon-Kucher & Partners, sustainability is rated as an important purchase criterion for 61 percent of U.S. consumers. Give one example of what your company is doing to embrace or promote sustainability in reference to botanicals.
Swaroop: International trade in botanicals is vast and complex. We have taken steps to address environmental oversight, benefits for farming/harvesting/collecting communities, closer relationships with growers and education. As a corporate philosophy, we don’t believe in sustainability labels – we trust the transparency backed by data and tools like blockchain. We have Implemented TagOne to drive an end-to-end transparency supply chain.
We are also exploring technology tools to address sustainability issues. For example: We have tested the world’s smallest IR scanner to try and automate quality testing. We use low-cost Android phone-based solutions to suit our supply base in developing nations. We focus on driving culture change with the ecosystem (internal and external) and continuously working with suppliers to drive the supply chain transparency culture. We back up the trust of our customers with data.
