At Core Botanicals®, we believe that the quality of herbal medicine begins with the herbs we choose. It’s not just about meeting regulatory standards—it’s about going beyond them to ensure that every single product you take is safe, potent, and effective.

Setting the Standard for Herbal Medicine

In Australia, herbal medicine ingredients are regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which requires that all ingredients be accurately identified. While this is an essential first step, it’s only part of the picture when it comes to delivering truly high-quality herbal products.

What many consumers don’t know is that there’s no regulatory requirement to test traditional herbal ingredients for potency  against globally recognised standards. This means that while products might be accurately labeled, especially for standardized ingredients, there’s no obligation to prove their strength.

At Core Botanicals®, we don’t believe that’s good enough and we’ve made it our mission to raise the bar.

Investing in Purity and Potency Testing

We invest heavily in our testing process because we believe that our customers deserve the best. Every herb that goes into our medicines is subjected to rigorous testing to ensure it meets the highest global standards for purity and potency. Each test costs $500 and as a small business, this is a big investment for us but one that we know is worth it for the effects that our customers get from our ingredients. In scientific terms, these standards are measured by High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) versus the pharmacopeia standard.

Our testing includes:

• Contaminant testing: We ensure our products are free from harmful substances like heavy metals, pesticides, and residual solvents.
• Microbial testing: We make sure there’s no bacterial or fungal contamination in any of our ingredients.
• HPLC and GC testing: These sophisticated techniques allow us to check the botanical fingerprint of our herbs and detect even the smallest traces of impurities such as pesticides and aflatoxins, ensuring the strongest, safest and purest herbal products.

While testing is crucial, it’s not just about checking boxes. For example, in one case, we tested over eleven different samples of a single herb before we found one that passed our strict potency and purity standards. This is the level of care and attention we bring to every batch of medicine we produce.

We put this work into practice, so that we can be confident that our community is receiving the best standard of herbal ingredients in our medicine.

A Commitment That Goes Beyond Requirements

What sets us apart is that we voluntarily choose to test our herbal ingredients using High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC), a gold-standard method for verifying each herb’s identity and qualifying its potency . At significant cost, we’ve established a rigorous testing regimen to maintain herbal potency comparable to world-leading standards,  and yet it’s not a requirement by the TGA. But at Core Botanicals®, we believe that the extra investment is worth it—because it ensures that what we deliver is truly the best herbal medicine available.