NPA Fly in Day Petra’s Recap: Fly in Day 2025 Last month, I was very honored to participate in NPA’s Fly In Day in Washington DC. This annual legislative advocacy event is an important way to educate elected representatives and their staffers about our industry, and to advocate for American consumers’ supplement access. The event […]
Category: Perspectives
HTPLC Association
HPTLC Association You already know Alkemist Labs is fanatical about botanical HPTLC testing and we were even more so last month as we hosted ~20 of our fellow plant scientists at our facility for the HPTLC Association meeting along with CAMAG Scientific, Inc. The week offered excellent technical presentations by Wilmer Perera and James Kababick, hands […]
WIN Summit
WIN Summit from Petra Never in my career have I had the opportunity to attend an event quite like the inaugural Women In Nutraceuticals Leadership Summit! And really that’s because there has never been a group quite like WIN. What a gift to spend a full day dedicated to thought provoking sessions on developing leadership […]
ICSB Recap
International Conference on the Science of Botanicals ICSB 2025 AT ICSB last month, Khanh Tran, Alkemist HPTLC, R&D Technical Supervisor, presented “Foraging for Methods: The Right HPTLC Method for the Right Specs. She provided this recap: This year’s International Conference on Botanical Science (ICSB) at Oxford, MI saw Anthony, Nick, and me in attendance, and […]
Expo West
Elan’s Expo West 2025 Recap This year’s Natural Products Expo West was amazing and also terrible. Let’s start with the terrible… Just before the show, we lost Michael McGuffin, long time AHPA president. I am deeply grateful to my incredible friend, colleague, mentor, and leader, Michael McGuffin, for shaping a big part of my professional […]
Year in Perspective
2024 Reflections from Elan Looking Back, Looking Forward Do you suffer from neck pain? I do. My massage therapist friends and my father, who is a retired chiropractor, believe it’s because I took up Jiu-Jitsu early in 2024. Considering I’m 45, have never played a contact sport, let alone a combat sport, and regularly get […]
Elan’s Super-Biased Quality Index
Elan’s Super-Biased Quality Index There’s this hilarious myth floating around that the dietary supplement industry is unregulated. Spoiler alert: it’s not true. I’ve been shouting this from the LinkedIn rooftops so much that my voice is starting to sound like RFK Jr’s. As someone who can identify roots (and all other plant and fungal parts) […]
SupplySide West Recap
SupplySide West Recap 2024 from Petra Erlandson I know you must be asking yourself right now, wow, I wonder what Petra thought of this year’s Supply Side West. What made it even more memorable than my previous 15, you ask? The first answer is that it is my last… just kidding! It was all of […]
Khanh Tran – AOAC Recap
Our HPTLC Supervisor Khanh Tran offers this recap from the AOAC annual meeting in Baltimore last month: Is it cold in here… or it just me at AOAC 2024 in Baltimore, Maryland? Although the session rooms may have induced from chills and had some attendees donning their winter jackets, the conference itself seamlessly blended topics […]
Reena Gordon Interview
Hear from our New COO Reena Gordon Reena Gordon began working with Alkemist Labs on a consulting capacity last spring, and after a few months, officially joined as the company’s first COO. We had to ask her, “why did a high-powered executive with your impressive global track record join an independent testing lab?” I joined […]