UNPA Annual Retreat 2025 Elan shares his observations on the UNPA Annual Retreat: This year’s UNPA Annual Members’ Retreat brought us back to beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, at the nearly incomprehensible Biltmore Estate. Somehow, it felt even more special than it did when we gathered there 11 years ago. On the eve of the one-year […]
Category: Perspectives
AHPA Botanical Congress
AHPA Botanical Congress 2025 Bryan Fine shared these observations on the AHPA Botanical Congress: Botanical Congress in Cincinnati, Ohio was a great educational and networking experience. This year’s event was unique because it was the first botanical congress not connected to a trade show. That format created a more focused environment for meaningful discussions on […]
SoCal
SoCal Dietary Supplements Consortium SoCal 2025 Regular readers know that Petra is a huge supporter of the SoCal Dietary Supplements Consortium (SCDSC), the partnership between FDA and ASQ FD&C to be a resource for the dietary supplement industry. Here are her thoughts on the recent meeting: “The 2025 Consortium did not disappoint! It was a […]
NPS Fly in Day
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 […]
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 2026 – Petra returns as elected board member There are so many things to say about the second WIN Summit. But I want to tell this year’s story by starting at the end and sharing my closing comments to our attendees* Thank you to everyone who is here, everyone who showed up, everyone who […]
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 […]
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) […]
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 […]
Choosing a Lab – Interview
How to Choose a Lab Content Piece Interview with Elan Where did this idea come from? In full transparency, which is kind of my thing, the idea was birthed as a gorilla marketing campaign to combat a particular lab doing harm to our industry. It was a subversive way to call them out without getting […]