The Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI), an organisation focused on ethical sourcing and sustainability in the herbs industry, has announced the release of its SHI Toolkit 3.0.
The toolkit includes practical tools, templates and best practices for sourcing botanicals in ways that support farmers, wild harvesters and the long-term supply of medicinal plants and was shaped from conversations with SHI's 55 member companies, including Traditional Medicinals, evanhealy, Pure Synergy, Gaia Herbs, Mountain Rose Herbs, Herb Pharm, Banyan Botanicals and Yogi, among others.
The new toolkit builds on SHI's earlier Sustainability and Regenerative Practices Toolkit 2.0 (then called the Sustainable Herbs Program based at the American Botanical Council) and focuses on members' experiences implementing sustainable sourcing best practices.
SHI said that this new version provides companies with guidance and actionable steps from thirteen chapters covering 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.
“This toolkit represents hundreds of hours of SHI members sharing challenges and identifying what works,” said Dr Ann Armbrecht, 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.
Many components of the toolkit are designed from the perspective of primary processors — those closest to the source with limited brand visibility.
For example, the chapter on true costs and fair pricing was developed through discussions within the Primary Processing Working Group, where processors shared insights on achieving price points and uncovering hidden costs.
“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 added.
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.
SHI is a pre-competitive collaboration hosted by the Sustainable Food Lab, bringing together herbal product and dietary supplement companies committed to sourcing in ways that support biodiversity, smallholder farmers and wild collector communities.
It supports 55 member companies through monthly meetings, Learning Labs, Learning Journeys and member-led working groups, which in 2025 alone produced buyer's guides for wild-harvested species, a shared emissions database and the case studies now collected in Toolkit 3.0.
Zacharia Levine, Head of Organizational Stewardship at The Synergy Company, said involvement with SHI has changed how his team operates. “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 SHI Toolkit 3.0 is now available here.
