Processing Herbal Products
There are two ways that a consumer can enjoy the benefits of herbal medicines. One is to take them raw, that is, to cultivate or gather them yourself from the wild. The second one is to purchase them from a local health store, at which point the herbs are already processed into their final form: food supplements.
Harnessing herbal plants and turning them into food supplements follow an industrial process. This process is composed of four steps: cleaning, drying, extraction and quality control. Each of these processes is intricate, and requires skilled personnel to handle the job.
Cleaning takes place right after the herb is harvested from either the wild or from a corporate nursery. Some suppliers of herbal medicines take care of their own herbs, but others turn to the wild for the absence of pesticide in the plants. When cleaning the herbs, they are washed with water and then screened. Afterwards, the leaves – the ones that matter –- are stripped from the stems. Some unwanted plants that may have stuck to the herb are also removed from it. In some companies, the process is done by hand.
Drying comes next. Drying is done in two ways: sun-drying or artificial drying. While sun-drying requires no machine, it is also very time-consuming. The plants are also at risk of being damaged by the sun’s heat. Artificial drying, on the other hand, does use machines and can be costly; however, the process is shortened to just a few days. The use of drying machines greatly improves the production time of a company, and enables it to produce more herbal medicines in a shorter span of time.
After the plants are dried, they are then shipped to a laboratory where the plants’ useful compounds are extracted. There are many ways to do that and these include:
-- Maceration Maceration is a process that involves the plant being soaked in solvent. Afterwards, the solvent is then drained off leaving only the important materials in a plant.
-- Gas extraction As its name suggests, the plants are subjected to high pressure gasses. The active ingredients in the plants are then evaporated and transferred to a separating chamber. This process involves the use of gases like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and ammonia, among others.
