2. what is chemical fingerprinting and why do you do it to your plants?
At sofi, we fingerprint each and every batch (harvest) of our plant remedies. “Fingerprinting” is essentially just a complicated term for collecting data that allows us to understand the complete profile of any given harvest of any given plant.
You see, unlike store-bought herbal remedies, fingerprinting our plants enables us to account for any external influence that may have impacted the ratio of active compounds within a particular extract.
Despite the use of plants for healing dating back thousands of years, there are still numerous technical challenges that natural medicine poses to the field of modern science - and ones we are only just beginning to unravel and truly understand.
Imagine the following scenario, for example:
You’re out for dinner at a restaurant when the waiter emerges and asks you what you’d like to drink. What if, instead of saying which bottle of red or white wine you planned to order, you just asked them to serve you grapes in a bottle! Kind of risky - wouldn’t you say?! It could quite possibly be the best dinner ever or the worst.
This is similar to the way we interact with store-bought remedies - each one claims to do something different, but none exactly specifies how and why that is.
What’s amazing, for those wine connoisseurs, however, is that they not only care for their type of wine and vineyard and location, but also the vintage or year the wine is from. This has to do with the fact that the ambient conditions year on year could be different, and the way that harvest receives sun, rain, will actually impact the availability of the compounds that really matter.
When it comes to other plants, it’s the same. Like us - the conditions in which plants grow can have a significant impact on them and the benefits they promote. Even the time in the lunar cycle that plants are harvested can impact on the ratio and potency of the active compounds that are present within.
In fact, between different species, batches, methods of extraction, active compounds, as well as external factors such as time of harvest, location, and storage conditions, the therapeutic properties of a given plant can differ completely.
As a consequence, the extent to which the plant actually works as intended to help an individual — whether it’s to reduce sleeplessness or increase calm — can vary completely if the chemical fingerprint of the specific plant extract is unknown.
At sofi, we realised there was a simpler way; we don’t have to standardise each and every one of our plants - we just have to understand what the differences between batches of our plants might mean for the individual using them.
And that is how we understand what works for you.
Not a lucky guess, or a “fingers-crossed!” - but a series of highly technical tests that we use to fingerprint every batch of our plants. In fact, you can watch the process in action at the sofi lab here, or learn more about the specific machines we use here.