The ingredient is a green tea-derived extract containing all eight major catechins, and is backed by clinical studies to substantiate its enhanced bioavailability.
“With Phytofare, we are really enhancing to our full range of solutions for functional food and beverage producers,” said Alan Rillorta, Director of Protein and Branded Ingredients at AIDP. “Plandaí’s proprietary technology provides scientific proof that the form of Green Tea really does matter, with Phytofare providing significant advantages over generic and other green tea products currently available on the market.”
Tea plantation roots
Plandaí, which has its corporate office in London, England but sources its raw material and does its processing in South Africa, began as an effort to rehabilitate a derelict tea plantation. The tea estate had gone to seed, literally, with the bushes allowed to grow into small trees and the processing facilities wrecked. After a number of years and a hefty infusion of cash, the company reported the rehabilitation process to be complete.
Plandaí has built its business model around a propriety processing and extraction system for live plant materials that alters the properties of phytonutrients in live plant material and rearranges them into nano-sized amorphous crystals, which greatly enhances their absorption. In the case of the tea from the plantation, the leaves are processed within an hour of picking.
According to Plandaí, the flavonoids in green tea are very poorly absorbed, with about 5% of the nutrients making it into the blood stream in an unmetabolized state. Further, the common industry process of freeze drying the leaf and then using heat and pressure to extract the phytochemicals, damages the molecules and leaves them largely inactive. By contrast, Plandaí’s process uses microscopic cavitation to remove the solids and leave the nutrients intact and highly bioactive. In fact, double-blind human clinical trials have shown that Plandaí’s green tea-based Phytofare extract has ten times the bioavailability of generic green tea.
Additionally, all eight green tea catechins were found, compared to just two from the generic, and those catechins remained active in the bloodstream at therapeutic levels for over 24 hours, where catechins from generic tea extracts had been eliminated within four hours. This exceptional level of bioactivity represents a huge change in the industry, the company has said.
A long and mutually profitable partnership
Callum Cottrell-Duffield, VP of sales and marketing for Plandaí, expressed his satisfaction with the new deal with AIDP. “We could not be more pleased to align Phytofare with a distributor having the stature and reputation of AIDP,” he said. “They are known for sourcing high-quality ingredients and providing proprietary solutions that address formulation challenges the health and wellness industries. Phytofare, and its encapsulated sister product, ph2 TM, fit nicely with their product range and existing customer base.
“This relationship, which covers the globe, except Europe and Africa where we are already strongly represented, gives us immediate worldwide exposure and distribution. We look forward to a long and mutually profitable partnership.”