Plant raw materials for infusions, extracts, and other natural products and Consistency.

Lately I’ve been having some really interesting conversations at Biofach about plant raw materials for infusions, extracts, and other natural products, and one theme keeps coming up again and again: Consistency.

With botanicals, even something as “simple” as the colour of a flower used for tea can change a lot, and not always for the obvious reasons.
Sometimes it’s the seed source: a supplier might provide hybrids (knowingly or not), and suddenly the crop isn’t the same plant profile you expected. Other times, the issue is processing: different drying conditions can accelerate oxidation, shifting color (and often chemistry too), turning bright flowers into browner material, and it's not because it's an hybrid. A potential buyer will frown at these product variations.

And then there’s what happens in the field:
If other producers nearby are growing the same species or subspecies, and if the species is insect-pollinated, cross-pollination can occur.
If some plants are left to self-seed, the next season may naturally bring more hybridisation, even when nobody intentionally changed anything.

All of this means non-consistent raw material can arise at multiple points in the value chain, from genetics, to farming practices, to post-harvest handling to storage.
That’s why farming practices and processing standardization are also essential if you want to deliver the same quality to clients year after year ☺️
But it doesn’t stop there.

Companies producing raw materials I humbly believe need to implement strong in-house critical control systems to identify exactly where variation is happening, whether at seed selection, cultivation, harvesting, drying (or other type of processing), storage, or transport. These critical points of analysis in house equipment have to be also fine-tuned to the type of segment you will be targeting your product/raw material.

Without traceability and defined control points along the chain, i humbly believe it becomes almost impossible to correct deviations and ensure long-term consistency.
Natural products are inherently complex.
And that complexity is precisely what makes them far more challenging to standardize than synthetic compounds, and far more interesting to work with too!