The Industry behind the Mitragyna Speciosa (Kratom tree):

There is a lot of information to be found around the world about the Red Sentol Tree, which is commonly known as the Kratom Tree, and its various uses such as dyeing, so much so that a large industry has sprung up around this plant in recent years. Some myths we would like to clear up.

The false "designations of origin":

In order to sell even more kratom, many a resourceful seller from Indonesia had the idea of selling Mitragyna Speciosa foliage with different designations to suggest that the product comes from different parts of Asia.

This is probably the most common misconception surrounding this plant to date. 95% of the kratom available on the world market comes from the Jongkong region of Borneo, Indonesia, where it is grown on farms. This means that it is almost impossible for a product called "Malaysian Green" to come from Malaysia.

When the market was not so crowded and there were only a few commercial wholesalers, they produced what they called different products in fixed mixing ratios so that the customer would feel that it was really a different product.

Unfortunately, to this day, many suppliers advertise their products according to the same outdated patterns without informing the customer, so that this myth is omnipresent to this day. That is why we consistently refrain from reusing the designations of our wholesalers.

The different varieties of Kratom based on the different vein colors?

Most customers have learned at some point that with kratom, the color of the leaf veins significantly changes the color appearance of the product. Unfortunately, this is not true, because if you look at kratom leaves, they are all green, regardless of their vein color.

The leaf vein is usually removed in the processing process and when we look at the finished kratom variants, the products made from reddish variants usually have a red tint, the green variants shine through a vibrant green and the white variants have a white tint. So how can an evergreen leaf have a color cast after drying?

To put it bluntly: The same kratom tree can produce leaves with red and white leaf veins, but most kratom leaves have a red leaf vein. The non-red veined kratom leaves occur too rarely to create commercially different products from them alone. It can be said that the lion's share of kratom products are made from red-veined leaves.

But how then does the difference between the varieties arise? The answer will baffle, but they arise solely during processing. Elementary here is the drying method. Some farmers have their own recipes and drying methods, but many producers make the variants as follows:

Red strains (brown shade): There are two different methods here:

1. The leaves are fermented in a plastic bag before drying.

2. The leaves are dried in the sun until they are reddish/brown.

Red strains (green/brown hue): Dried in drying houses for 5-7 days.

Green strains (dark green hue): Dried in drying houses for 2-3 days.

Green strain (light green shade): Dried in the sun for one day.

White strains: A common way is to store the leaves in a shady place for a few days after harvesting and before drying until they change colour and then dry them.

Many farmers do not want to reveal the exact process of production, because competition is high and producing a good product is essential for survival.

In addition to the drying method, the varieties can also be mixed together to produce a new variety.

The natural wild Mitragyna Speciosa tree, or is it?

A decade ago most of the Kratom available on the market came from wild-growing trees. These trees were sometimes up to 30 meters tall and harvesters simply lacked the equipment to safely harvest such a wild-growing tree. As a result, the trees were often cut down to make it easier to get at the leaves. As a result, some of these trees have disappeared.

Due to the increasing demand and the more and more difficult to find trees, the first locals started to replace their no longer productive rubber trees with Kratom trees. In the meantime, there is hardly any Kratom on the market that has not been grown on farms. The majority is grown on the numerous farms that exist today, thus providing the locals with an important livelihood without which they would have difficulty surviving. Harvesting pruned farm trees requires less time and no safety equipment for harvesters, which guarantees a lower price and higher availability.

Unfortunately there are still no legal quality requirements for the production of Mitragyna Speciosa products in Indonesia. Although there are now some Indonesian wholesalers who train their farmers how to produce a high quality product, in many cases this is not the standard. The trained farmers dry the leaves in specially constructed drying houses, but often you can still find Kratom on the market that has been dried on a tarp next to a road. The latter type of processing is one of the main causes of contamination of the final products with sand, which is why we can only advise against such products.

Also the use of pesticides in the cultivation of Kratom is not controlled by default, so as a customer you have to rely on the fact that your trusted dealer works with a wholesaler who has trained his farmers accordingly to avoid such agents. Strong and mature trees do not need pesticides. Trees that are harvested too often or very young, on the other hand, are susceptible to disease or insect infestation. We therefore check every batch for pesticide residues and work exclusively with experienced wholesalers who are in close contact with their farmers and train them not to use pesticides.

Indonesia, despite its beauty, is one of the countries with the worst environmental pollution. Among other things, the commercial palm trees so numerous in Indonesia, which are needed for the production of palm oil, are grown using large amounts of pesticides. These pesticides get into the groundwater, are poured into the nearby rivers by the workers or rain down elsewhere, so that we can detect small residues again and again in Kratom that has been grown professionally. The Kratom tree loves water and therefore prefers to grow directly on banks, where it absorbs the pesticides and heavy metals from the poisoned rivers (https://www.mongabay.co.id/2022/03/03/kebun-dan-pabrik-sawit-wilmar-diduga-cemari-sungai-di-kalimantan-barat/).

The measuring methods available in Germany are extremely sensitive and detect even minimal traces. By the way, this does not only happen in Indonesia, because also German organic farmers often complain about pesticide residues on their products, which come from the commercial neighbouring field (https://www.oekolandbau.de/verarbeitung/produktion/qualitaetssicherung/rueckstaende/ubiquitaere-belastung-mit-pflanzenschutzmitteln/).

Due to these environmental factors, minimal contamination with pesticides cannot always be 100% avoided. Questionable products with major impurities do not end up on sale and are disposed of by us because they do not meet our quality standards. In recent years, we have been able to improve many things in cooperation with our wholesalers, so that we can often no longer detect any pesticides at all. We transparently provide a corresponding result for each batch.