quality safety & Purity

We understand that you need ingredients that are clean, pure, safe and consistent without sacrificing efficacy, potency, or economy. It is our uncompromising commitment at Draco to provide you with that. Both your reputation and, ultimately, the health of your end consumer depend on it and we understand how important that is.

Quality, Safety & Purity Pioneers

Since our inception in 1995, we have been trailblazers in the industry in raising the bar on quality, safety, and purity of botanical extract ingredients. We were the first, and still the only supplier to offer potent herbal extracts that are truly both full spectrum and standardized in the same product, allowing you to take advantage of the naturally balanced full spectrum of botanical compounds in the plant, with consistent measurability. We blazed the trail for quality by being among the first to achieve ISO9001 Certification for quality standards, among the first to achieve Kosher certification for our processing, and now the first and only botanical extractor to get organic certification in China. We are simply not satisfied until we get it right.

The Best of Nature, Science and Tradition

Draco is an American company headquartered in San Jose, CA., with our wholly-owned manufacturing facility in Shanghai, China. With this arrangement, we are in a unique position to provide you with world class quality standards, while introducing the US market to a culture with a vast traditional herbal medicine system that has undergone 5,000 years of continuous refinement. We are on the forefront of earth friendly plant production, modern pharmacognosical science, cutting-edge extraction technologies, and traditional empirical wisdom – all in one. With uncertainty in the marketplace over the possibility of contamination, adulteration, species inaccuracies and the like, Draco is the botanical ingredients supplier you can really trust.

Vertical Integration from Seed to Drum

One way we achieve superior quality, safety and purity of our products is by controlling the entire process of making an extract. From the seeds in the ground to harvest to extraction and finally drum packaging, we are there to oversee every step of the way. We know how frustrating it can be to source extracts from a supplier that has little or no control over raw plant materials.

Botanical Inspection

We place trained Draco botanists at the farm or wildcrafting site to ensure purity of proper plant species and crop quality. They use analytical techniques like TLC to check for the presence of marker compounds, and screen for pesticides, heavy metals and other possible contaminants. Over 70% of our incoming raw plant material is ethically wildcrafted (see back page). Regardless, all incoming raw plant material must pass our stringent quality assurance protocols to be accepted for extraction.

Water Extraction

Raw plant material is processed in pure, clean, natural water. No alcohol, hexane or other industrial solvent is ever used, ensuring that no solvent residues will ever be present in the finished extract. The water used is USP grade, first undergoing multilayer micro filtration, activated charcoal filtration, deionization, and multi-stage UV light treatment. Through a proprietary reiterative process, even stubborn compounds with low water solubility are extracted into the full spectrum end product.

Thorough Analytical Testing

At every step of processing, Draco extracts are subjected to extensive analytical testing, including simple organoleptic testing, HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography), HPTLC (High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography), and UV spectrophotometry. This gives us accurate qualitative and quantitative data to ensure the correct full spectrum balance, optimal marker compound levels, and batch-to-batch consistency.

We also conduct thorough microbial testing. We are proud to say that we consistently achieve some of the lowest micro plate counts in the industry, typically 100 times lower than our average competitor, without irradiation or ETO treatment. Instead, we use a non-damaging multi-stage HTST (High Temperature Short Time) procedure during extraction.

Clean Room Packaging

All extraction takes place within a contained system. After an extract is spray dried into a powder form, it is routed directly to a separate temperature and humidity controlled clean room area. The clean room keeps the extract free from moisture, dirt and other extract powders during packaging. Here it is vacuum bagged in two layers of packaging with an ultra low diffusion Mylar® inner layer, then packed in protective drums for your additional quality assurance.