Long before it was a beverage company, Herbert was a research laboratory.
Our aim? To figure out how to take the very best of what the plant world has to offer, and convert that into forms that are as effective as they are delicious and healthy.
This is the starting point for every formulation, and it’s why Herbert Labs remains at the very heart of our company.
Clean
Herbert keeps our ingredient lists recognizable and short, employing only time-tested naturally occurring preservatives like apple cider vinegar and citrus, to keep our products shelf stable.
Healthy
Herbert is sweetened using only organic juice—never with sugar substitutes and contains four grams of sugar or less per bottle.
Delicious
Herbert makes good health a pleasure, by combining the healing power of plants with great-tasting, cold-pressed, organic juice.
Effective
Herbert is more than just delicious, healthy beverages. Every product uses only ingredients that deliver a benefit to your body and your mind.
Herbert’s approach builds on millennia of traditional healing knowledge, while applying evidence-based, scientific rigor.
Herbert doesn’t blindly defer to tradition, but instead stringently interrogates it to be sure that products we formulate are doing everything we expect them to—safely and consistently.
Do you really need a laboratory to make the most of plants?
The therapeutic compounds in plants take on a wide variety of complex forms. Learning to harness their power means turning them into other forms that are more readily understood by the human organism.
A great deal of human ingenuity has been spent over thousands of years trying to figure out how best to unlock the nourishing and healing potential of the natural world. These efforts form the very basis of human culture.
Herbert doesn’t blindly defer to tradition, but instead stringently interrogates it to be sure that products we formulate are doing everything we expect them to—safely and consistently.
In some cases, we are developing novel approaches to working with plants, using technologies originally developed for the pharmaceutical industry both to measure and amplify the efficacy of healing plants.
But to be clear, this isn’t Frankenfood. We’re not manipulating plant genomes or trying to one-up nature. Herbert respects the innate intelligence of plant life and, indeed, all of the natural world. Our goal is to translate that intelligence into a language that more of us can understand and benefit from, and to do so with wisdom, compassion and humility.
A step beyond
Traditional herbal medicine has generally relied on three techniques for plant extraction: tisanes, or teas; tincturing; and dried, powdered herbs. Tincturing, which involves steeping plant material in a combination of alcohol and water, has the benefit of being able to dissolve some of the fat soluble compounds. In the case of cannabis tinctures, fat-soluble cannabinoids and terpenes are dissolved into another fat—typically coconut or MCT oil. Drying and powderizing plants, on the other hand, means that all of the plant material in question can be ingested. But neither tinctures nor powders ensure that what is extracted is actually absorbed with any efficiency in the body—which is why they often don’t work as well or as quickly as we’d like them to.
Herbert goes a step beyond these methods, employing processes both ancient and modern to ensure efficient extraction and high bioavailability.
When deliberately deployed, fermentation has the capacity not merely to transform materials but to unlock from them previously hidden properties.
Fermentation refers to any process whereby microorganisms, most often bacteria and yeast, break down one substance into another. Humans have used fermentation to transform materials in the natural world for at least 9000 years. Fermentation itself, being a naturally occurring process, has been going on for much, much longer than that.
When deliberately deployed, fermentation has the capacity not merely to transform materials but to unlock from them previously hidden properties. As seen in the transformation of grape juice into wine, fermentation reveals the psychoactive potential latent in all sugar. As embodied in bread-making, fermentation can turn a substance not easily digested—ground wheat—into something the body can make use of. As seen in cheese-making, fermentation can vastly extend the shelf-life of otherwise instantly perishable foods. Kimchi and sauerkraut demonstrate how the humble cabbage can be turned into a powerful delivery mechanism for microbes that benefit the human gut.
What is true of grape juice, wheat and milk is also true of healing plants—and even more so. Fermenting healing plants changes their chemistry in ways that amplify their effects in the body, making them more potent and faster-acting. After all, fermentation is basically pre-digestion, a process by which organic materials are readied for use in the human body. Fermented plant extracts give us access to aspects of plants’ healing powers—to certain forms of phytonutrients, in other words—which would be unattainable through teas or powders alone.
The use of fermented plant extracts for healing purposes has not been widely practiced, in part achieving consistent fermentation isn’t easy. But easy isn’t what Herbert’s after. Effective is. That’s why Herbert’s researchers work as tirelessly as they do—to ensure that every product that comes out of Herbert Labs is ready to go to work for you.