New Sustainable Herbs Initiative embraces industry collaboration on ethical botanical sourcing

06 Aug 2024 --- Moving from an educational program to expanding industry collaboration on sustainable practices in the botanical industry, the Sustainable Herbs Program has become an independent initiative sponsored by the Sustainable Food Lab, a non-profit aiming to shift sustainability from niche to mainstream. We catch up with Dr. Ann Armbrecht, the program’s founder and director, to discuss the program’s achievements and goals for the future as the Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI).

“My vision is to help nurture or steward a way of doing business that truly is healing, not just for the person taking the product, but for the communities where it’s sourced and the land,” Armbrecht tells Nutrition Insight.

“Right now, I think these products are on a pretty shaky foundation. There’s a lot that’s not healing for the plants, the environment or the people doing the work. It would be really great if it were so that the end product was actually helping create circles of healing.”

To reach that vision, she aims to keep “creating circles and communities where that’s what we’re doing.” She aims to reach 18% of companies that “do what they can do” to be ethical companies, highlighting the idea that returning 18% of a mono-crop field to biodiversity can “turn the whole field.” 

From education to systems change
SHI started as a program at the American Botanical Council (ABC), focusing on creating educational content to teach and train herbal product buyers on sustainability and working with herbal companies to share best practices. 

“As I was doing that work and leading or hosting conversations or activities at trade shows, I realized everybody knows what needs to happen — traceability, transparency, better wages — the question isn’t so much ‘give me more information,’ it’s thinking about what the barriers are to taking action,” highlights Armbrecht.  

Writing her book, “Business in Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicine in a Global Industry,” also helped Armbrecht shape her approach to the initiative. 

“Before that book, I kept thinking there had to be some right way to do this, and then I realized there’s not. It’s how we ask questions,” she explains. It’s about how we can come together. How do we need to be present in ourselves to listen, to address the challenges rather than coming in as experts?” 

SHI started as an educational sustainability program for herbal product buyers and sharing best practices with companies.Therefore, she started organizing Learning Labs, aiming to create a place for stakeholders in the herbal products industry to understand the more profound, systemic issues beneath challenges in the botanical industry and build a network of ongoing support and collaboration to tackle them. 

The Learning Labs are facilitated by the Presencing Institute, which works with a model of awareness-based systems change — getting to the root causes of systemic change and identifying key steps to address those issues. 

“That collaborative work is where I want to take Sustainable Herbs,” says Armbrecht. “ABC is not the platform for that. It creates educational content in a detailed, thorough way; that’s what it’s known for.” 

“I was looking for a place where I could learn about doing this work from the people I work with. Sustainable Food Lab has been doing this work for the past 20 years, starting by facilitating some work with people from the Presencing Institute, the same framework that has inspired my current work.” 

The Learning Labs built momentum and resulted in several working groups, for example, on a Scope 3 emissions collaboration and creating an in-person Learning Journey in 2023. 

Bringing companies together 
Armbrecht details that the Learning Labs and Learning Journeys surpassed her expectations in terms of their ability to bring people together in a structured way with speakers on key issues, such as migrant farmworkers, indigenous rights, farming practices and agroforestry. 

“Those are some of the themes that are most front and center for many participants in SHI — where is the money going, how much are farmers and wild harvesters making, what is their living income, those kinds of questions. That’s one area that the November Learning Journey in Nicaragua will dive into more deeply because that’s a key issue for the company that’s hosting us.” 

She highlights that these in-person gatherings showed that bringing people together in an intentional way takes them outside of company silos and allows for great collaboration and new ideas. 

“Although I’m very focused on what I’m doing at SHI, the experience or content I create, participants say it is as important for them the people they meet through participating,” Armbrecht details. “They follow up and collaborate in different ways, for example, around glass bottles, ideas about suppliers, producer groups who are making connections around new markets or buyers who are finding producer groups through participating.” 

Armbrecht organized Learning Labs for stakeholders to understand and tackle the botanical industry’s profound, systemic issues.Educational tools 
When the SHI was still a program at ABC, Armbrecht created and updated the Sustainable and Regenerative Practices Toolkit to support companies in ensuring a sustainable supply of botanicals. She used this information, accessible through a PDF, to host a series of webinars during and after the COVID-19 pandemic to help “bring it to life.” 

“The toolkit contains a lot of information that feels hard to access,” says Armbrecht. “But talking to some of the people most active in the SHI programming, they said how valuable that was — the specific content as they entered the botanical sector and the videos.” 

She underscores that the toolkit helped “define the herbal product sector” as distinct from the food industry or spices sector. 

Armbrecht explains that for the webinars, she aimed to bring in “different voices that are not often given a platform. Because to get the platform pre-COVID, you had to be present at a tradeshow, which costs excessive money.” 

Building a new model 
The SHI will shift to a membership model, where companies pay a fee to join. The organization will keep its working groups, which are communities of practice focusing on particular research, such as wild harvesting and specific botanical species. 

“The first goal is to clarify what SHI will offer members, and then we’ll focus on finishing research initiatives on particular topics that we’ve started,” says Armbrecht. 

“We’re researching to tell more concrete stories,” she adds. One is on wild plant harvesting, and another is a Scope 3 Working Group. We want to have something to show that. Right now, there are a lot of ideas percolating; we need to show what’s emerged from that.”

The SHI toolkit helped define the herbal product sector as distinct from the food industry or spices sector.In addition, Armbrecht is building a curriculum on sourcing and sustainability with two other herbalists who work in the industry to develop more content for a larger audience — buyers and consumers. 

She underscores that the industry is experiencing big changes, with consolidation and companies being acquired, and “there has to be a continued driver to pay attention to sustainability.” 

Reaching decision-makers and producers
While still part of ABC, the organization also began initiating pre-competitive conversations among responsible, forward-thinking members of the herb and medicinal plant industry and other collaborations to enhance sustainable and regenerative consciousness and practices. 

SHI is also planning a leadership Learning Lab. Armbrecht explains: “This is for a small group around questions of ownership and leadership in the herbal products industry and how the values of herbalism show up in companies.” 

“The main people I work with are in sourcing or sustainability, but the chief financial officer can say we can’t do that. It also has to be at that higher level. This will be just the first three sessions online, but I hope that can help me clarify how to work on that decision-making level.” 

SHI also works with a group of five or six active primary processors. Although brands are not invited to this working group, Armbrecht is bringing in buyers with substantial experience in improving quality. She aims to share best practices horizontally among them and strengthen their voice in speaking to brands to address unequal power balances. 

“That’s what I’d like to think about, how to shift the balance and give them a stronger voice,” she adds. “I’m trying to make that something attractive for producer groups and worth their time.” 

By Jolanda van Hal