Quality and Testing

At Clear Source we seek out growers that produce the highest quality of herbs and foods and spend considerable resources assuring the purity and quality of each ingredient. 

As Clear Source and Spring Wind expands its lines of Organic and ND Grade herbs, we gain more direct connections with the growers of our herbs. This helps us to increase the transparency of our sourcing and aids in our goal of providing carefully grown, correctly identified Chinese herbs and other Asian foods. The highlights of our quality and testing program can be summarized as follows:

Correct species - We put great effort into correctly identifying the species of the items we sell. Macroscopic and microscopic examinations are employed to compliment other organoleptic (sense-derived) data such as smell and taste in determining species identification. We use the Chinese Pharmacopeia for verification where the given herb is listed in that text. For the few herbs that require chemical analysis to reliably determine correct identification we rely on laboratory testing with HPLC or TLC.

Quality evaluations - We purchase herbs in small batches. This insures that the herbs are fresh. We try to visit all the growing sites of our herbs and connect directly with the growers whenever possible(This is rather difficult right now due to the pandemic). We obtain samples of each lot before purchase to ensure the quality meets our strict standards. Herbs must be clean, fresh and of great color, taste, and sapor. We also use herb-specific criteria when evaluating quality. There are usually minimum amounts of active compounds that an herb should contain in order for it to qualify for herbal use in the Chinese Pharmacopeia. We test most of our herbs for these compounds to insure that the herb meets this quality standard.  

More info to be added.

Rigorous testing - Clear Source and Spring Wind has one of he most rigorous pesticide testing programs in the industry. We accept only a ND (none detected) result on our pesticide tests. Our sulfur tests are tested either by in-house vapor testing (limit of 1.0 ppm) or by lab titration for sulfites (ND only). We also test aflatoxin-susceptible herbs such as seeds and grains for aflatoxins. Heavy metal testing is also performed for each lot of herbs. More information about our testing can be found at Herb Grade Definitions.

More info to be added

All our testing data can be provided upon request.