Say the number
Every dose, every species, on the front of the pack. If a figure is not flattering, it still goes on the label — the alternative is asking you to trust a word like "blend".
our story
Built in Ventura, one batch at a time
Herban Development started because a spreadsheet did not match a label. Everything since — the two houses, the potency windows, the growers we drive out to meet — comes from that one discrepancy.
Rosa Delgado
founder & formulator
a note from the founder
I started this because the math was wrong
I spent six years running quality for a contract manufacturer, which mostly meant reading other people's certificates of analysis. In 2019 I bought a well-reviewed mushroom supplement for my own use, pulled the COA out of curiosity, and found that the assayed potency was less than half of what the front of the pack implied. Not fraud, exactly. Just a proprietary blend doing what proprietary blends are designed to do.
I bought eleven more brands that month and ran the same check. Two held up. The rest were somewhere between optimistic and meaningless — and every one of them was selling confidence to people who had no way to verify it.
So Herban Development is not built around a mushroom. It is built around a specification: a stated potency window, a lot number, and a document you can pull up on your phone in the aisle. The painted packaging is genuinely my sister's work, and Moods exists because she was right that not everything has to look like a clinic. But the discipline underneath both houses is the same, and it is the only thing I would ask you to judge us on.
— Rosa
what we hold to
Three rules
Sell less, better
Eight products, not eighty. Each one has to justify a slot against the one it would replace, which is why the catalogue has shrunk twice since we started.
Tell people to stop
Our dosing guidance spends more words on breaks and step-downs than on reasons to take more. That costs us reorders. It is the entire point of the brand.
sourcing
Four farms, all of them visited
We contract by harvest window rather than by the ton, which means we buy less and pay more per kilo. In exchange we get species verification before anything ships, a named grower attached to every lot, and the ability to walk a batch backwards when something looks off in the assay.
- 100% fruiting body — never mycelium grown on grain
- Dual extraction, water and ethanol, for the full compound profile
- Species verified by the grower and re-verified on receipt in Ventura
- Third-party assay on every lot for potency, heavy metals and microbials
how it's made
Four stages, no shortcuts
Consistency is a manufacturing problem before it is a marketing one. Here is the whole chain, from the grower's bench to the lot number stamped on your pouch.
- 01
Sourced
Fruiting bodies from a short list of growers we have visited, contracted by harvest window rather than by the ton. Species-verified before anything ships to us.
- 02
Formulated
Dual extraction, then blended to a target rather than to a recipe. Supporting actives are chosen for what they do to the curve, not for what they do to the label.
- 03
Dosed
Every lot is assayed and adjusted until it lands inside the potency window on the front of the pack. Anything outside the window gets reworked or scrapped.
- 04
Packaged
Filled, sealed and lot-stamped in Ventura. The QR on the back corner pulls the certificate of analysis for the exact batch in your hand.
the ritual
Made for the part of the day that is yours
Coastal California is not a marketing angle for us, it is the commute. Sunday Squeeze exists because of the drive up the 101, Groundwork because of what happens when you cannot put the day down, and Tidal Wave because a drink mix should taste like something you would order anyway.
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