Sustainable Herbs Initiative Releases Sourcing Toolkit for Industry

The Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI), the collaborative organization focused on ethical sourcing and sustainability in the herbs industry, released the SHI Toolkit 3.0, a collection of practical tools, templates, and best practices for sourcing botanicals in ways that support farmers, wild harvesters, and the long-term supply of medicinal plants.

The toolkit is the product of two years of collaboration among SHI’s 55 member companies, including Traditional Medicinals, Evanhealy, Pure Synergy, Gaia Herbs, Mountain Rose Herbs, Herb Pharm, Banyan Botanicals, Yogi, and many more.

The toolkit builds upon SHI’s earlier Sustainability and Regenerative Practices Toolkit 2.0, which was created when the organization was based at the American Botanical Council. The new toolkit includes experiences and perspectives of SHI members who’ve put those practices into place. Its thirteen chapters, organized around foundations, sourcing, relationships, standards, and economics, cover core SHI practices, a sourcing self-assessment, relationship building, risk mapping, certifications, true cost and fair pricing, quality gates, and marketing and certification guidance written specifically for primary processors. It provides companies with guidance and actionable steps to follow.

The guide acknowledges that herbs aren’t interchangeable raw materials, covering different handling processes for a variety of plant parts. Since it is common for one company to source dozens of botanicals, many companies work through intermediaries who can manage that variety. However, that complexity makes transparency and traceability hard to achieve in practice. The toolkit offers a map toward closing that gap: a self-assessment to benchmark honestly where a company stands today, guidelines for the concrete steps forward, and metrics for proving progress.

“This toolkit represents hundreds of hours of SHI members sharing challenges and identifying what works,” said Ann Armbrecht, PhD, founder and director of the Sustainable Herbs Initiative. “Sitting with farmers in Nicaragua, walking fields in Oregon, listening in circles after long days of travel, we kept hearing the same insights surface again and again. This toolkit is our attempt to gather them in a form we and others can use.”

Much of the toolkit comes from primary processors: people who are closest to the source of botanical materials who have the least visibility at the brand level. The chapter on true costs and fair pricing, for instance, grew out of meetings from a working group made up of primary processors discussing how to make hidden costs visible.

“Quality starts at the source, and sourcing is under threat right now, from erratic rainfall in India to heat waves and fires in southern France, to much more,” Armbrecht said. “No single company can solve that alone. It can be hard for companies to even identify, let alone acknowledge what is failing in their supply chain. SHI is the room where that honesty is possible.”

Involvement with SHI has changed how The Synergy Company operates, noted Zacharia Levine, head of organizational stewardship at the company. “It is now commonplace for our employees to reference an idea, training, case study, or collaborative working group when making decisions that impact our suppliers, internal operations, or consumers,” Levine said. “Inevitably, we make more holistic and responsible decisions as a result.”

The new toolkit will serve as the foundation for the organization’s 2026 SHI Learning Lab, which starts later this month.