By Eric Brand

I was looking over some notes on herbal product labeling in Canada, and I noticed a few interesting things. I wrote another blog that talked about the advantages and the disadvantages of the laws that regulate herbal products in Canada, and here I just want to post a small comment on their labeling requirements.

Two things that are very interesting:

Concentration ratios must be listed on the Canadian labels. This means that the manufacturer must tell the consumer the relationship between the raw herbs and the finished product. If six pounds of raw herbs are used to make one pound of dry extract, the product would be required to provide this information on the label. This is not required by law in the USA.

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Most U.S. companies do not provide information on concentration ratios for extracts, so it is pretty much guesswork for practitioners to estimate the raw herb equivalent of the extracts that they are providing. This situation is getting better, and we see that more suppliers are starting to including concentration ratio information on the label. However, we have a long way to go before our labels match the clarity of granule labels in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, or mainland China. Canada appears to be going for increased transparency, which I think is a good thing in terms of labeling.

Ingredient amounts must also be listed in Canada. It doesn't appear that they have the loophole for "proprietary blends," where the ingredients are listed but the amounts are secret. This will upset many manufacturers who would prefer to keep their formulation as a trade secret, but it is probably a bit better for the consumer. Blue Poppy is one of the few companies that already provides information on individual ingredient amounts as well as concentration ratios, so the Canadian regulations basically just match the same thing that we've already been doing. However, I could see how these things would be a problem for a company that sells, say, a tea mix that has a distinct flavor that is hard to duplicate. The proprietary blend loophole in U.S. law allows such a company to keep their recipe a secret so that it cannot be easily copied by a competitor. I wonder if Canada will make Coca-Cola have the same transparency on its proprietary flavors, or are they only picking on us small herbal folks?

As I mentioned before, the new Canadian laws are becoming increasingly complicated. What will happen to herbal medicine in Canada? Will it go the way of Australia, with arduous regulatory barriers for import, limited availability of products, and sky-high prices? Many of the labeling features are reasonable and positive, but the overall marketplace in Canada is going to be much more closely regulated than what we have in the U.S.

I wonder if we will see Chinese herb shops opening just on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, just like we see liquor stores clustered on the Nevada side of the Nevada-Utah border, or prescription pharmacies on the U.S.-Mexico border. The prices and selection would be much better in the U.S., but the product information would be much more transparent in Canada. People could come to the U.S. to buy products, and go to Canada to find out what is in them.

Will Canadian companies just break the law when it comes to labeling in Canada? Maybe. The Canadian gold standard from the point of regulation is the tea pill (yes, truth is stranger than fiction). How many tea pills have you ever seen that say anything about their concentration ratios, ingredient quantities, and excipients? What percentage of tea pill importers actually have access to this information themselves? You could see why people would want to regulate it, but the simple fact of the matter is that a lot of tea pill suppliers probably don't know the precise ratios in the products they sell. Will such suppliers improve their tracking systems, or just fudge the numbers?

Already in the USA we are required to label products correctly in terms of identity, but many companies fudge a bit in small ways. For example, most Chinatown shops sell a type of Wang Bu Liu Xing that has no botanical relationship to the official Wang Bu Liu Xing source plant, but the product is still labeled Wang Bu Liu Xing. Even GMP factories have been known to mix up herbs- I once remember seeing a presentation by a CM professor in Taiwan who did chemical tests on dozens of domestically produced GMP extract powders and found that the majority had a substitute species of Chuan Niu Xi.

These labeling problems are generally unintentional, they just result from regional variations in herbal use and education. However, we do see some labeling discrepancies that are convenient accidents. For example, most consumers don't know the herb name Lu Jiao (mature deer antler) but they know the name Lu Rong (velvet antler). The two substances are both deer antler, but they are totally different in terms of their cost and TCM effect. Almost nobody puts 500 kg of good Lu Rong into an extractor, virtually all the granule deer antler products on the market are made from the much cheaper Lu Jiao. The label may say Lu Rong, but much of the time the product itself was made from Lu Jiao. In other situations where labeling discrepancies seem too convenient, some companies leave out inert ingredients like starch or dextrin on the label (even if it is 30-60% of the total product by weight). This type of thing is what the Canadian laws are presumably intending to solve, but the overall surrounding complexity of their legal structure may cause a lot of side effects that are not truly helpful for the herbal community.

What will be the net effect of the Canadian label changes and regulations? Someone should think about keeping track of the number of brands available and the prices in Canada, it would be interesting data. And perhaps some entrepreneurs should stake out retail space for Chinese herbal pharmacies on the U.S. side of the border.