Biofach 2025: Sanapianta on organic medicinal and aromatic plants and empowering local farmers
13 Mar 2025 | Sanapianta
Irene Tosti of Sanapianta discussed the company’s journey from converting conventional fields in Umbria, Italy, into organic medicinal and aromatic plant farms. She highlighted the company’s focus on sustainability, quality, and transparency in ingredient sourcing for the herbal tea and nutraceutical industries. Tosti also shared how Sanapianta empowers local farmers through organic practices and high-quality standards, including its work toward Fair For Life certification.
So hello and welcome to Nutrition Insights interview series.
I'm Vina Patel.
I'm a senior journalist at Nutrition Insight, and I'm so happy to be here to talk to you.
Can you please introduce yourself?
Yes, hi, this is Irene from Italy's Sanna Pianta.
We are a producer of medicinal and aromatic plants in central Italy.
We make only organic.
We have been in business for Ages over 20 years something like that.
We are organic certified since then and we are now looking into and we are in the process of being certified for fair trade for for life.
Yeah, exciting.
I have a question for you, and the first one is, so you've mentioned it a bit, but can you share the Story behind your company and what inspired you to create the products that you sell.
The company was founded by a group of close friends and family members and then merged into a larger group of agricultural companies, also family companies which traditionally.
Made conventional crops and they started being an agent of change just from the very beginning of the company by introducing organic certified medicinal and aromatic plants which are a great success.
The quality is very good.
We believe the quality, we're doing our best and our customers are happy.
We sell to wholesalers but also to the nutraceutical sector, which is a great opportunity for medicinal and aromatic plants.
We take very much care.
Harvesting time and processing the plants.
We are looking very much also into the wellness industry and we are selling very much into the herbal tea industry, also wellness.
OK, yeah, can you maybe tell me a little bit about what kind of herbs are popular and or important that are relevant for the nutrition industry as?
Yes, for sure.
This is passiflower, passion flower.
Mhm.
Olive olive leaf.
The na na.
And then we have Lemon ball.
We have Also, radix, it's very important.
Roots are also very important for the industry.
Aquinasia.
That's the same you you find here.
That's the herb and that's the radix also very important.
You have Sorry, I, basil, basil is you use it when you cook, but you can also use it for the vice coal and farmer industry, and we are also looking into creating a producer group which is a European Community concept, which means this cluster of.
Business units who are making the same job professionally and making a networking, having the opportunity to share services and exporting.
