As the nutraceutical industry looks for more sustainable and scalable ingredient sources, companies are increasingly turning to agriculture for answers. Cepham is one example, combining an experimental farm with in-house manufacturing to support ingredient development from cultivation through commercial production.
Anand Swaroop, PhD, founder and president, Cepham, said Goel Certified Organic Farm is a living lab of sorts where Cepham grows medicinal plants, fruits and vegetables to better understand how they perform under natural growing conditions. The company also uses the site to optimize cultivation practices before transferring production to farmers they partner with.
Established in 2008, the farm serves as a testing ground for ingredient development. Here, researchers can better understand how plants grow, evaluate their commercial potential, and explore whether they can be sustainably scaled.
Once the plants are grown, they are taken to Cepham’s manufacturing plant and extraction facility, Chemical Resources.
“That’s where we extract to learn firsthand what actives we can get and what we cannot extract, given the climatic conditions over here,” Swaroop said, noting it must be sustainable and scalable. “Even if I have the best extract in the world, if I cannot really provide thousands of kilos, it’s not going to go anywhere.”
Working on the farm also helps the company connect with growers.
“We talk to them on a different level because…we are all farmers,” he said. “They farm, we farm and so we speak their language, we understand…challenges they are facing and where they have issues on scaling up so it helps a lot.”
The experimental farm, located in Haryana, Northern India, is exploring options for more sustainable ingredients — A great example of how science, agriculture and sustainability can all work together to drive innovation. One example of that innovation came from an unlikely source: discarded plum tree trimmings.
The region surrounding the farm is known for fruit production, particularly plum trees. Each year, growers prune their orchards, leaving behind large amounts of woody material that is often burned.
“There was smog in the air and we could not figure out what’s going on and we started investigating, why there was smog for three or four months,” Swaroop said. He explained that nearby farmers were burning twigs from plum trees because they needed to cut the plants to grow more fruits. Their solution? Buy the twigs from the farmers.
“So we end up with a few truckloads of dried twigs in our farm, and when they become kind of a fire hazard, we thought we’ll take it to our lap and see if we can get something out of that.”
Plum trees belong to the same botanical family as Pygeum africanum, a tree traditionally harvested in Africa for its bark and used in men’s health supplements. The team wondered whether the discarded plum branches might contain similar compounds, so they traded their sun hats in for lab coats.
“What we found was a total accident, lucky discovery that we found both plants are 99.9 % alike in phytochemicals,” explained.
The testing showed that compounds in the discarded plum tree material were remarkably similar to those found in Pygeum bark. The discovery ultimately led Cepham to develop AdoniXYen, an ingredient made from agricultural byproducts that would otherwise be burned or discarded. The approach not only creates a commercially scalable ingredient, but also helps reduce pollution caused by farmers burning the discarded branches. For Cepham, innovation doesn’t stop at the farm. Once ingredients are identified and evaluated, the next step is commercial production.
Swaroop said the company chose to keep manufacturing in-house to maintain greater control over product development, the supply chain and, in some cases, farming. While some raw materials are grown on the company’s farm and others are sourced externally, extraction, purification, fermentation and manufacturing are all handled in-house.
The vertically integrated model allows the company to move ingredient concepts from cultivation and research through extraction and manufacturing under a single organization. From experimental farming and ingredient discovery to extraction and manufacturing, the visit offered a firsthand look at how sustainability, science, and supply chain can control and intersect across the nutraceutical industry.
“We think that we are the custodians of natural wealth which have been given to us and how we can actually convert these to wellness for self-care for people who don’t have access to it,” he said. “We believe being healthy is everything, no matter what you’re doing in life, if you’re not healthy, you cannot really enjoy what you work hard for.”
