Russell Carter, the founder of Heartland Elderberry Farms, shares the benefits of elderberry syrup and the dirty secrets of the industry.
Russell and his wife built Heartland from the ground up as a direct challenge to the billion-dollar industry—offering a pure, five-ingredient elderberry syrup with no added water or fillers, where 80% of every bottle is cold-pressed elderberry juice from their own Midwest farm, plus raw honey from their beehives.
RESOURCES
- Visit Heartland Elderberry Farms website heartlandelderberryfarms.com
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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 Intro Snip
00:55 Introduce Russell Carter from Heartland Elderberry Farms
04:50 Russell’s Power words spoken to him by his father: If you are going to do something and you are passionate about it, Do it to the best of your ability. Go into it knowing fully well in your mind that you are going to succeed. If you are truly passionate about something, just go do it and do it well… no excuses.
06:50 How did the passion for elderberries specifically come from?
07:30 How much honey does a beehive produce?
09:00 What makes your honey award winning?
10:20 What is the importance of bees
12:10 What is killing the bees?
14:10 What makes honey crystallized?
16:00 What is a common misconception about organic honey?
17:55 What is Fake Honey?
19:04 Should Honey be refrigerated?
19:50 How can you tell if your honey is fermenting?
21:25 Can you eat plain elderberries right off the plant?
23:55 What do elderberries taste like?
24:41 What nutrients are elderberries known for and what are the health benefits?
26:23 What is elderberry syrup used for?
28:40 Have you ever fermented elderberries?
30:15 What are the elderberry products made at Heartland Elderberry Farms
31:30 What is in your competitors elderberry products
32:39 What are the ingredients in your elderberry syrup?
36:40 How many elderberry brands are there compared to elderberry farms?
39:03 What is the synergy of the other ingredients in your elderberry syrup?
43:35 What was the wisdom imparted by your chiropractor when it comes to the things you consume?
45:50 What is a crazy elderberry Testimonial from one of your customers?
49:00 Any new elderberry products in the making?
TRANSCRIPT
So there are compounds in elderberries. The studies are showing that stop that replication from happening. So if you are taking elderberry syrup throughout the cold and flu season, you are essentially protecting your body
against that incubation period from happening.
You are listening to the Dr. Haley Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you optimize your health. Each episode there will be an interview or a message to help you discover better health. We will be featuring health radicals on the show to bring new ideas to the table, as well as doubling down on key fundamentals to support you living your best life.
Your host is no other than the founder of Haley Nutrition Dr. Michael Haley.
This is the Dr. Haley Show podcast. I’m Dr. Michael Haley, your show host. And today we’re going to learn about elderberries and honey. Russell Carter is the founder of Heartland Elderberry Farms, a family owned wellness brand creating farm to bottle elderberry syrup made with just five pure ingredients no water, no additives. After leaving his corporate career to pursue his passion for natural health, Russell has focused on crafting simple, high quality products that families can trust.
Russell, thank you for joining me on the show here. We’re going to learn a lot. I’m curious, though, what did you do before becoming a farmer? Yeah, absolutely. Well, first and foremost, thanks for having us on. Dr. Haley. Yeah. So before we took the plunge and went full time into,
elderberry farming,
I actually worked, in a directed a marketing department, for a fortune 500 company here in town.
Did that for many, many years. Great. Great career. But,
the pull of elderberries
and raising bees was a little too strong and,
the businesses kept growing over the years. And so we
finally took the plunge a few years back and deviated from that corporate path.
and now
we’re fully fledged into elderberry farming.
It sounds like the perfect training, though, for having your own business. I think marketing is probably the most important aspect of it. Yeah, and you’re doing it well. When I did a little research
on your company, it was very magnetic. It’s like, I can’t wait to have Russell on the Dr. Haley show. And I think it’s because you come across so authentic.
Well, I’ll take that as an immense compliment. Yeah. Certainly. Yeah. When you whenever you start a business, I’m sure you have quite a few entrepreneurs listening to your show every week.
every month. I think the, marketing your product
is first and foremost essential to
any growth of a business. You can have the best, best product on the market
in your niche.
And if people don’t know you exist, your business isn’t going to go too far. So, I definitely believe yeah, marketing probably played a pretty good role in helping us expand our business. Yeah. Yeah. This is a health show, and we’re going to be talking about health and nutrition. But yeah, I am curious. I like asking this typically at the end of the show, but I’m putting it toward the front end.
What were some power words spoken into your life, whether as a young child, that kind of stuck with you is something that plays into who you are today. And for an example, for me, I remember seeing this one chiropractor speaking. I’m a chiropractor. He was speaking to a bunch of chiropractors. And you know, when you have a great speaker at the end, everyone like, rushes to the front and they have their questions.
Oh, yeah. And this guy was just super focused. And I’m going to say filled with the spirit. He was amazing. And when it came my turn to ask my question. I said, Dr. Rob, I struggle with. And he pointed at me and he said, stop struggling. And then he went to the next person. And it was one of those things.
It’s like, you know what? It really doesn’t matter what I said after that. Yeah. That’s right. Stop struggling. Move on. And that was something that I applied to my life ever since. Yes. What are some power words that made you who you are now?
that’s pretty powerful. I think that just to hit on what you just said, the, in the scheme of things, in the grand scheme of life, what we’re struggling with was here in the now, if we just take a step back and reflect on it, it may not be as big of a deal that we think it is.
Life sure is easier if you can live on that. in that mantra, on that motto there.
somethings
my dad always told me growing up. And I think
a lot of parents tell their kids this, but if you’re going to do something and you’re passionate about it, do it to the best of your ability.
Go into it knowing
fully well in your mind that you are going to succeed. If you’re truly passionate about something. Just go do it and do it well. Don’t. Don’t half ass anything. Don’t make excuses as to why something can’t be done. Go do it and
Just enjoy the process. Enjoy the ride
and just, enjoy what you’re doing.
If you’re going to do it. So
I certainly try to live by that. No matter if I was working in corporate America or doing what we’re doing now. Follow your passion and just do it to the best you can do. So one word that you use there in that a couple times was passion. If you’re passionate about it, follow your passion.
And I agree with that because there’s so many people that are doing what they’re not passionate about. For the paycheck. Yeah, it is no way to live. It might be a stepping stone. Yeah, but it’s no way to live. Yeah. I think the, I think you’re absolutely right there. And I think the folks are, you know, going to a job they may not particularly like.
They’re just working for the paycheck. I think the challenge is that everyone really has to ask themselves, what are they passionate about?
and can they turn that passion into,
something that actually maybe provides an income for them? I think that’s the biggest challenge. And that certainly is a challenge to make those two connect. Sometimes.
Well, and that’s where things like marketing, come into play. You look at it and you say, okay, well, there’s a lot of different ways to market, and there’s a lot of different ways to monetize what’s going to work. I’m passionate about natural food products all of a sudden, and elderberries in particular. Where does that come from. The elderberry specifically.
Yeah. So I’ll just give you a quick background on us and kind of what the journey that we have taken. About ten years ago we actually started,
a commercial beekeeping operation, and this is before we even had the first elderberry plant in the ground. And we were still working. My wife and I were both still working full time, and we grew
the honeybee business to about a 455, a hive operation.
So it when we grew to that level, it became almost impossible to do corporate life and honey bees. So the honey, the honey. Russell, can I can I interrupt? Because here’s where my brain’s going with that. I don’t understand about 455 hives is, how much honey does a hive produce? Yeah. Okay. That’s a great question. So in an average year, you’ll probably get, between 6 to 10 gallons of honey per hive.
Okay, I see. So
that’s it depends on rainfall and just a lot of different things. So from year to year, it certainly fluctuates. But so
Yeah, we’re certainly doing, quite a bit of honey production every year.
And we have and I’m picturing, you know, a couple of five gallon buckets per hive.
Yeah. So we’re looking we’re probably talking about, 1005 gallon buckets of honey. Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s pretty close to that when we when we put them in, you know, barrels for storage, but,
Yeah,
it adds up pretty quickly when we’re in the harvest season. And we actually just wrapped up, our harvest for this year.
And I think that we’re somewhere in that 3 to 4000 gallon range. So and we have built over the years, we’ve built such a great local market for our honey,
our local town in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has a, a statewide,
voters,
it’s called a Reader’s Choice award, and we’ve won best honey three years in a row.
And we’re certainly the largest beekeeping operation, probably within a 50 mile radius of us.
we’re the biggest we produce most honey, and people seem to like the honey, so And you know what makes it the best? Honey, it really it’s placement. It’s where you put your bees. So we’re currently running, our hives on 14 different properties.
So you really have to space the bees out. Otherwise, they’ll deplete nectar sources in a given area. Adding more hives to that area will not produce more honey. It spreads the honey between the hives. So we have 14,
properties where we run our bees on strategically placed. And we really, really focus on, staying as far away from agricultural corn, soybeans, that kind of stuff as possible.
We really hone in on organic farms. Alfalfa,
clover, wildflower plantings where we can, so it’s the honey is going to be
directly dependent on the nectar sources that they’re consuming. So
if they’re going after the soybeans and stuff like that, you’re going to get a certain flavor. If they’re going after alfalfa and wildflowers, you’re going to get a distinctly new flavor.
So,
it really comes down to just being careful where you place your hives. So, this is pretty elementary, but tell us the importance of bees. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Because right now in the world we live in today, we have to increase awareness. Yeah. No doubt about it. So the. Yeah, I mean, I hear from I hear from a lot of folks when I was a kid, we used to have honeybees everywhere and they’re just not there anymore.
I cannot tell you how many times I hear that at farmer’s markets or just in daily conversations,
with customers,
they are going away
really in mass. I mean, we hear it on the news all the time.
I think the biggest reason for that is probably, habitat loss.
there’s a couple things. One, there’s a couple
new pests, to the honeybees. Within the last 20 years, there’s something called a Varroa mite,
that makes news all the time that that didn’t exist in the 1980s. And that was introduced, to the United States,
from overseas. And that is really devastated.
Our honeybee population. So, where 20 years ago, 30 years ago, you could easily just put a beehive in your backyard and let it go the entire summer with almost no management. And
they would do really, really well for you. They’d produce a good crop. They’d make it through the winter. Everything else. That is not the case today.
If you’re going to get into beekeeping, you need to be aware of
That there is some management of that beehive that you’re going to have to do, to be successful, at least there’s Varroa mites. You have to do you really have to be cognizant of their habitat, what kind of food is available to them
in your area?
It’s all of that kind of plays into it, but, yeah. Habitat loss. And then just a few different pests.
some things that come on the scene to really kind of set them back. I think science is making a pretty good push towards combating that at this point. There’s a lot of new treatments out there for honeybees that are really safe for the bees.
Some are even organic,
that are really kind of pushing back against, some of these invasive pest. So. Okay. And where I live, I know the big problem is our city does not like mosquitoes. So they spray. And I hate this when you wake up the next day and you see a bunch of dead bees on your driveway.
Yeah, no doubt about it. Yeah, I don’t like mosquitoes either, but yeah, kind of a double edged sword there. Yeah.
obviously when you know cities spray and things like that
even things as simple as first, their first nectar sources coming out of the winter are dandelions. Okay. For most of America, dandelions are the first real pollen and nectar sources for bees to replenish winter storage that they’ve gone through, food storage
I know everyone likes these well manicured lawns, I understand that, but when you’re spraying your yard and getting rid of those dandelions and clover to have this pristine yard it. When I talk about habitat loss, I am talking directly at that. It’s not necessarily the farms. And we’ve always had farms, I’ve always had that.
I am talking about chemical uses
on well manicured lawns. I mean, even my own neighbors. I love them to death, but,
they spray their yard every year and, they just really like that nice green grass without any kind of weeds in it. So it’s little things like that that we can all do, to really just get bees in our area a chance to grow
thrive and then expand to bring the bees back
to a level that we used to have back in the 70s and 80s.
I don’t think people cared as much about manicured lawns as they probably do today. It is crazy. I agree with you. And I live in a neighborhood where half the homes have real green lawns, and others have flowers everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get that, you get to mix in. You know who the honey bee lovers are in your community?
There’s no doubt about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I got one question about honey before we go on to elderberry. Yeah, yeah, you got it. I happen to like honey. That’s, like crystallized. Is that something that happens naturally, or am I having something that I shouldn’t know if it will happen with raw honey? Okay, so raw honey by definition is honey that has never been heated.
Okay. So
when you’re looking at honey that, you go to your local grocery store, for example, there is a reason why those can sit on the shelf there for months. And it’s because they have been highly heated. And when
you do that, you are changing the molecular structure of the sugar in the honey that prevents it from crystallizing.
So it is no longer raw honey, raw honey straight from a hive that you extract. That’s all we sell is raw honey. Eventually
It’ll go through the crystallization process. And that’s how you know actually that you have
good honey
to liquefy it.
some folks like the granular the feeling in the mouth. It’s easier to spread it’s good to eat.
Some folks don’t like that so much
to liquefy it again. It’s really, really simple. You do not want to microwave it, and you don’t want to heat it past like 120 degrees. So all you really want to do is take your bottle and we sell everything in glass bottles for this exact reason. You want to take your bottle and you want to put it, in the hottest tap water you can get and place your bottle in that tap water.
And that is generally going to be sufficient enough by the time your water gets cool. Just letting it sit your honey will then have, chance to liquefy up again and still stays in that raw form because it never reached a temperature point
that would constitute it not being raw. That makes sense, because I think the hottest tap water setting is about 120.
Yeah, I believe one 120 -130 up in that ballpark. Okay. So one of interest, what other misconception that I think some of your viewers may find really interesting and we get this question weekly, is why is your honey not organic? I see organic honey, all the time. In the stores I go to Costco, I see organic honey.
The USDA and your viewers can Google this. It’s real simple. The USDA will not,
certify any,
American beekeeper as organic. They just will not do it, no matter where you live in the country, you can live in Hawaii. You can live in the middle of Wyoming. They will not certify American beekeepers honey as organic because they will.
They basically say, we cannot control where the bees go, and they may drift into a place that has been sprayed, that they wouldn’t consider organic. So when you see organic honey labeled on the store, all you gotta do is flip that bottle over. It is 100% imported. Okay. It comes from other countries that have a much more lax, requirements for being listed as organic in their country.
So yeah. And then if they import it, the USDA is just taking that country’s word that it’s organic, and then they’re allowing that label on it. Really, really. It’s kind of it’s kind of confusing to a lot of customers when they see that. But it’s not American honey. It’s always going to be imported. Their bees must be tracked with little devices or something.
Yeah, exactly. Or they don’t. They don’t leave our organic farms. Right. Yeah. They have in invisible fence up. Now it’s really, I think
the requirements of some of these other countries, on what they constitute as organic, are not nearly as probably stringent as what we do in the United States. And I know that there’s other concerns that it’s not necessarily.
Honey, I have read plenty of content. Talking about fake honey is that a real thing? 100%? Yeah. I actually read an article about three years ago where,
they took, 31 samples, off of the grocery store shelves. 31 samples of honey and 28 of the 31 contained additives like,
corn, syrups,
sugar, all sorts of different things.
It’s that prevalent in store bought honey that they’re adding two things to it. And another thing the USDA does, I guess, is probably not the direction of the podcast. But another thing the USDA does is
They are very, very lax on what they can, what they constitute as honey. So if you add, flavor honey flavorings to, corn syrup or something like that, they will still allow that to be labeled as honey.
So when they’re importing things like that, even though they know that they have additives to them, they will still allow that honey label to pass. Wow. Wow. That’s crazy. Yeah, Buy local. Yeah, for sure, for sure. How long is honey good for. And does it have to be refrigerated? No, It doesn’t need to be refrigerated. It’s all about the moisture.
Okay, so if the if the honey is harvested at the correct moisture level between 16.5, an 18.5% moisture,
if you fall in that moisture level, honey will never go bad. I mean, they found 2000 year old honey that it was still considered edible when moisture is bottled or harvested and the moisture level is above 18.5%, you get into that 19-20%.
It will eventually ferment, and then it will go bad. So
it’s really important that the beekeeper is aware of
that they’re harvesting at the correct moisture. Yeah. What’s the sign of it being bad. Is it do you taste it? Do you see it? Yeah, you can see smell it
definitely through the fermentation process, so it will start to have an alcohol smell.
I mean, that’s what it does. The water and sugar,
when it gets exposed to a yeast or a bacteria, it will ferment. It turns into alcohol basically.
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Let’s talk about elderberries. Yeah. I did a quick search because
if I go to Wholefoods.com or something like that, sure, and do a search for blueberries, I find blueberries.
Yeah. And blueberry products. If I search for elderberry or elderberries,
I find elderberry products, but not elderberries. Can you eat elderberries by themselves? The answer is yes.
There’s a lot of, I would call it misinformation out there. As far as, are you able to eat fresh elderberries? There is, I think the jury is still out on it a little bit.
And there’s also a distinction between the European elderberry grown overseas in Ukraine and Poland and places like that versus the American elderberry.
the level of toxins in the seeds of the berries varieties are different. So a lot of times when you hear you all, you can’t eat fresh elderberries. They’ll make you sick. I’ll tell you right now, we’ve been eating fresh elderberries.
You know,
not in mass quantity, but while we’re picking elderberries, we always eat them.
and it’s never done anything to us. It’s not doesn’t, has never made us sick. Is it similar to the seed, the apricot kernel where there’s, you know, amygdala or something like that, where people suggest that it can be beneficial, but you might get an upset stomach if you consume too many.
That’s exactly right. Yeah, that’s exactly right.
I think probably different people are more sensitive to it than others. I think
the consensus is still today that elderberries should be heated.
to get rid of that toxin, I forget exactly what I even what it’s what’s in there.
But, Yeah, that I think if
any searches, I think
the experts would probably say it still needs to be heated
to some level, not boiling or anything like that, but a soft heat
to make them safer
would be probably appropriate. But if the real reason you’re not finding elderberries for mass sale is because there is not.
Elderberry farming is such a niche farming,
operation still today,
is such a small scale that there’s just not enough acres planted of elderberry in this country to supply it. That’s the first reason. The second reason is elderberries have such a short shelf life. So if you pick elderberries in the morning the next day, they’re already bad.
If you don’t, if you don’t process them or freeze them same day, they go bad within the first day. So the shelf life may you’ll never you’ll never, no matter what happens in elderberry farming, if the growth,
continues, you’ll never find fresh elderberries in the store. Just because of the shelf life. Interesting. What do they taste like?
Yeah,
they’re really tart.
I would say it’s almost like a cranberry. They do have sugars in them. And different varieties that we grow do have higher sugar content. And some of those are a, a little bit better at eating.
Most of the varieties we grow, they’re actually a pretty tart, tart berry.
And they’re really small. So I don’t know if you’ve ever seen clusters of elderberry, but the elderberries are about the size of a pea, so
they’re actually really a small berry. Smaller than blueberries. But yeah, they’re probably half the size of a blueberry. Yeah. Okay. And when I hear tart, I’m thinking maybe high vitamin C or what’s the primary nutrient?
Yeah, there’s a ton of vitamin C in elderberries. And the antioxidant level
is through the roof. I mean,
if you look at berries across the board, wild blueberries, for example, have been touted as extremely high in antioxidants that we should be eating. Elderberries have three times the level of antioxidants of a wild blueberry. So just incredibly, incredibly healthy for you.
and then obviously, throughout the cold and flu season,
there’s been so much research done on the benefits of elderberry in respiratory health. And just really keeping your immune system,
at a very high level through the cold and flu season to either prevent illness or to shorten the duration of the illness entirely.
So,
there are certainly benefits to taking elderberries and, consuming elderberries or elderberry syrup, elderberry products, throughout the year because of the antioxidant level just keeping you healthy. But
then certainly through the cold and flu season, just giving you that added immune boost. And you’ve already, you know, answered this question and what you just said now.
And I remember growing up, I’m this is going to date me. But I remember we used to have something called Coke syrup, which was essentially like Coca-Cola syrup. And our parents would give it to us if we had an upset stomach. Yeah.
and we were familiar with cough syrup. Yeah. And the syrups, you know, isn’t something that we’re that familiar with anymore if we think of, especially when there’s a berry in it, if I’m hearing blueberry syrup or strawberry syrup,
I’m picturing a stack of pancakes. That’s exactly right. Yeah. What is elderberry syrup primarily used for? Yeah,
it’s for a wellness. I mean,
it’s to help your immune system,
It just working really at a high level for you and then staying at that high level. It’s really used for, I would say probably 90%, 80% the least of our business is through the
months of, September through March, the cold and flu season, is where everybody,
gets back on elderberry syrup.
It’s consumed daily. You just take a tablespoon or a teaspoon for children.
it’s delicious. And it’s just really taken just to help your immune system. Yeah,
there’s studies out there that will show if you take elderberry syrup at the onset of any kind of illness or anything like that, it will then help shorten the length of that illness or prevent you from being sick all together.
So there is the antioxidants in elderberry, and there are certain compounds that are found only in elderberries and not in
other fruit products or berries, that actually stop the replication from happening. So if you are exposed to somebody
that is sick,
you are not immediately sick yourself. There’s an incubation period that happens inside your body, right?
And that incubation period allows that virus to spread. And then only after it spreads do you feel the effects
of being ill. So there are compounds in elderberries. The studies are showing that stop that replication from happening. So if you are taking elderberry syrup throughout the cold and flu season, you are essentially protecting your body
against that incubation period from happening.
If you’re not taking it as early on in that process to kind of shorten that,
is certainly going to help you reduce the length of your sickness. So what I’m hearing is suppressing replication gives your immune system a chance to ramp
up against that. You nailed it. Antigen, virus, bacteria, whatever it is, you nailed it.
And I was specifically talking about viruses or viruses and bacteria, viruses and bacteria, colds and flu. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am finding this pretty fascinating. I want to tap into something else that you express, some understanding in fermentation. Have you ever fermented elderberries? Yeah. So yeah. The answer. Yes. So elderberry wine, believe it or not, is delicious.
we have dabbled in it, a few times here and there.
We haven’t for a few years, but, elderberry wine is becoming a pretty popular,
thing with wineries. If they can get their hands on it, sourcing elderberry juice
is very, very difficult. Again, the farming of elderberries,
is such a niche.
Still, it is growing at a really rapid pace actually, but there’s just not enough acres to go around. But it’s pretty interesting. So yeah, elderberry wine is pretty good. And I was thinking it more in terms of almost like a fire cider type of, oh yeah. Yeah. Like use, you know, the scriptures, say use a little wine for your stomach and your frequent infirmities.
And I think of that when a lot of people will misinterpret that and say, see, you know, we’re supposed to drink wine. Yeah. Right. But it’s specifically, I believe, talking about the probiotic nature of it because it’s for your stomach and your frequent infirmities as we’re, boosting our immune system not only with, prebiotics, probiotics, but also post biotics from the fermentation process.
Yeah, that can support our microbiome and immune system. Yes. And, boy, I wonder what that would be like. Including some elderberries in my fire cider. Yeah, you certainly could.
we do offer, we sell just pure elderberry juice. So on our farm, the berries get picked in the morning.
then they’re processed and juiced the same day.
So. And
by the end of that day, they’re frozen. So is a very quick turnaround. So
the two things we sell, and make here on our farm is just pure elderberry juice. That would be going right into what you’re saying.
they’re made into additional products like fire ciders, put in the smoothies,
whatever you have.
And then we make the elderberry syrup as well, which is a more finished, ready to consume, product. So, it is interesting to note because the,
farming is
such a niche, elderberry farming is such a niche thing in the United States, overwhelmingly the elderberry syrups that you find. And this is kind of what led us to begin an elderberry farm.
we have been consumers of elderberry products for probably 10 to 15 years. My entire family,
my mom was taking elderberry products as a girl. She used to go out in the country and just pick them wild. And then they would
make them into, tinctures and all sorts of things, as a child.
So we kind of grew up taking elderberry products that way.
what you find in the market? And we kind of challenge our customers just to don’t take our word for this. You can just go and look,
on your own elderberry product that you’re consuming is they are almost always probably 90% plus. They have added water
as the number one ingredient is water.
So you’re already getting a diluted, less potent product right out of the gate. And they’re listing water on their. Not only that, and a lot of them have malic acid, raw sugars, preservatives, a bunch of other things added to them. And that is not what we wanted to take as a family. So
we have some makers here on the farm.
And so we said, you know what? Let’s just start growing elderberries for our own use and for our family’s use. And that has grown every year. This year we planted another 3000 plants in the ground, on top of what we already do. Next year, we’ll probably do another 5000 plants on the ground. So we just continue to grow as the demand for the products grow.
in our elderberry syrup, as you alluded to earlier in the podcast, it’s only five simple ingredients.
a number one ingredient. 80% of your bottle is as a cold pressed elderberry juice. Then the second ingredient is raw honey. The third is fresh ginger juice. So we juice ginger. And that’s the third ingredient. Then we add Ceylon cinnamon and star anise.
Those are the
only five ingredients.
So there’s no dilution of anything. And the reason, why folks are adding water, it’s kind of a twofold thing. One, obviously patching to extend, you know, the quantity of syrup they’re getting. But more importantly is they’re using a dehydrated berry that is imported because so few, so few people are growing it.
In the United States. You cannot find bulk elderberry juice. You have to grow it yourself or you have to import, dried elderberries. Ukraine and Poland are two of the big exporters of elderberry and as soon as you
dehydrate berries, you are losing nutritional value. Anytime you dehydrate something, up to 20% of the nutritional value of that product is lost.
And then you’re leaving it to the manufacturer of a product to reconstitute it at whatever level
they deem fit. So if you look at some of the reviews
of competing elderberry syrups, so that’s I would say
some elderberry is better than nothing. But a lot of them are saying it’s very watery. This is, you know, it’s kind of diluted as, you know, there.
So we feel like we have one of the better elderberry syrups on the market because we do not add
any water to it. You know, Russell, I think this is true about almost any nutrition product. And I’m very familiar with this in my industry. I have an aloe vera company. Oh okay. Yeah. And when it comes to the different brands and we could be talking about orange juice or tomato juice or whatever it is.
Yeah. And what we find is there’s a lot more brands than there are farms. And in the case of my product, aloe vera. Yeah, generally speaking, there’s a lot of aloe vera companies out there. Yeah. But there’s only, you know, 4 or 5 farms that are supplying all of the different brands throughout the United States. sure. And a lot of this is processed in bulk, and it might be shipped to the United States in 55 gallon drums or in 500 gallon or whatever.
They are, the IBC containers, international beverage containers. I think it stands for. And that has already been likely not only pasteurized, filtered, and preserved. Yeah, but hot filled into those plastic containers. Yeah. Prior to shipping them here. And companies will buy those with all of the preservatives in it. Yeah. Re pasteurized. Add their own set of preservatives, which are the actual ones that show up on the label, not the original preservatives of the original farmer.
Yeah, and some of them will even bottle it in glass. And you think, well, it’s in glass, so it must be good. Yeah. The industry is kind of messed up now. We actually don’t have our own aloe farms. We are contracted with one of the big names, but one thing we do differently is
we install our equipment on their farm and we supervise, and they have processes for us that are completely different.
Oh, that’s all then all of their other customers, and instead of their main customer, you know, inside of us buying it from one of the big companies in the United States that buys it from whatever farm we have, it, our own container coming directly from that farm. That’s fantastic. I hope someday to be able to have our own farms as you’re doing it.
Yeah. How many of the elderberry brands actually have their own farms? And I’m not looking for a number. Maybe a rough percentage. It has to be less than 1%. I mean, if I can literally go down the line, if I just tell you right now, if you have water listed on your bottle, that is not growing anything, okay.
And
that is a fact. I mean, they’re if you’re adding water, the only reason you’re adding water is because you’re buying a dehydrated berry. So and you’re not going to grow your own deliveries to then dehydrate them to then reconstitute them. Right. You would juice it freeze a juice and then use it as you needed it. So there are a lot.
And you, I’m sure you know this, especially with the aloe vera. Same it’s same thing. There are a lot of elderberry syrups on the market today. Some very, very big name brands. You’re Mary Ruth, you’re Sambucol, you know, all of these that are out there on the market, very big name brands that people are buying that are just they’re almost just garbage, elderberry products.
I hate to say that, but that if you look at the ingredients, they really are just filling them with just garbage. And there’s just they’re just kind of reconstituting it. Yeah, dried elderberry, but there are some good ones out there. And,
if you’re going to look for a good elderberry syrup, find one that doesn’t have water.
And they’re listing elderberry juice,
from non reconstituted juice as one of the ingredients, I think you’re much better off, much more potent,
product,
and a lot less preservatives and things like that involved.
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Tell me about the synergy of the other ingredients. Yeah. So
the fact that we have
our own beekeeping business that we’ve run for ten years, obviously we’re sourcing all of our honey from our own farm.
So not only we growing the elderberries, here on the farm, we also are adding our own honey to the product. So,
that’s pretty cool. But raw honey in general,
has just an array of health benefits, from allergies to just digestion and all sorts of different things. But the fresh ginger that we use, it’s organic ginger, that juice, each of the ingredients has additional benefits beyond just the elderberries.
Ginger is great for digestion. Cinnamon. That’s actually one that I keep in my home very regularly. And I’m glad that Costco actually sells these big boxes of ginger. And I’ll buy two of the big boxes at a time. Yeah, juice it up and maybe make a quart of ginger juice, and we’ll store it in jars in the freezer to use regularly now.
But it’s an everyday thing that we go to. So we you know, I don’t have elderberry, I do have honey, I do have ginger, and I love ginger for the, anti-inflammatory, immune boosting. There’s so many benefits to it. Yeah, no doubt about it. So. And then way you Ceylon cinnamon same thing I mean
it’s good for circulation and all sorts of different things.
And then star anise or anise, however, we pronounce that the, that’s the one I’m not familiar with. What. Isn’t that like a licorice kind of thing? It is. Yeah, exactly. So when folks see that on our label, they’re kind of turned off. If they know what it is, because
it does have a black licorice flavor, right?
That’s what star anise is. It’s a black licorice. It’s a Chinese herb. Has a really, really,
a large array of health benefits as well, just in its own right. But, we use such a small amount, because of the strong, black licorice flavor. Really almost to a point where you do not even taste it.
It’s the honey and the cinnamon and the ginger really overpower the star anise. So really, when
you’re taking the shot of the elderberry juice in elderberry syrup. You don’t taste it. But. Yeah. So all of the ingredients are pretty much. We plan it out,
that each of the ingredients has its own benefit.
Yeah. The benefits of the cinnamon are what? Circulation. Cinnamon is great for circulation. As a as a primary one. There are there are some other ones. It’s really, cinnamon is also very high in antioxidants if you’re using real cinnamon. So there are a lot of imitation cinnamon out there. But, it’s Ceylon cinnamon is not cheap.
So there’s a lot of other cinnamon
that are,
knock off cinnamons that probably don’t have the same benefits. But Ceylon cinnamon, if you’ve never heard
of that,
it is considered the true cinnamon. Okay. No, I didn’t know that. And I need to be fact checked on this, but I think cinnamon is also used for blood sugar control to some extent in my write about that.
I do believe that is correct. Yes, I actually have a brother and a sister that are both diabetic, and I remember them having a conversation with us a while back about cinnamon, helping them regulate blood sugars. Oh, okay. Interesting. You know, I there’s no magic bullets out there when it comes to nutrition. However, we all have our customers and our crazy testimonials.
I like to remind people when we hear things
that I’m going to ask you for here, that being healthy is a lifestyle. And if you buy one thing for a specific response, really what you’ve done is taken a medical approach where you’re buying something to quench a
symptom. And that’s not what this is about. This is about things that we can use to improve our overall lifestyle.
But with that said, what are some crazy stories you’ve heard from your customers? Well,
I’m going to touch on what you just said because I’m reminded, I have a very, very good friend of mine. He’s also a chiropractor, here in town. And they sell our elderberry syrup,
in their practice. And I was talking to him one day and he kind of,
mirrored what you just said.
he put it like this. Everything we put in our body is either slightly toxic or slightly helpful. So balance that out every day.
what you putting? Is it going to slightly benefit you or is it slightly harmful? So
it’s interesting in that regard. Yeah, yeah. But have you heard people say that, you know, they had seasons where they would always get sick and now they don’t anymore or what do you hear?
Yeah. For sure. So there are
a lot of stories.
the people come back and tell us a lot of school teachers, especially this time of year, a lot of school teachers are coming back to us,
and saying, hey, I the first week of school, for the last five years, ten years, I have gotten sick.
every single, first week of school. This is the first year I finally got put on the elderberry syrup, and I finally made it through my first week of school without getting sick. So we hear that very often, from school teachers. And then it’s in that same vein. It’s the kids. My kids are always sick.
The first week of school, getting reintroduced to the germs and things like that. And my kids were not sick this first week of school this year, so hallelujah. Yeah, absolutely. It’s like that kind of stuff. It’s like
that’s what it’s all about.
it’s literally taking something natural that God gave us that has these benefits.
it’s delicious. The kids can take it, the teachers can take it. And, and really are just kind of help keeping you healthy.
on the more extreme side. And I tell everybody this,
we are farmers, right? We grow elderberries and we raise honey bees. We are not doctors. That’s just first and foremost, right?
we’re not the scientists running tests on these things and things like that. So when we hear stories, we love to hear the stories, but at the same time,
they’re just stories to us that we appreciate hearing. We’re not out there touting these, touting these stories as a cure-all right.
So
one example that really sticks out to us, that I think about often. About three years ago, I had,
lady come to us, actually, her husband did. And that
she had been sick for about three weeks. Bedridden, sick. She could not get out of bed. She had been to the doctor numerous times over that period.
They could not figure out what was wrong with her. And she was just ill, very nauseous all the time. Had no appetite.
And they had heard about elderberry syrup as an immune boosting thing. And they thought, why not? Let’s just try it. So they got their bottle of elderberry syrup. A week later, the woman actually came back to us
and shared her story with us, and she said she was taking the elderberry syrup.
And by day three, she woke up and she felt amazing. And she’s like, I don’t know how to explain it, but your elderberry syrup, whatever is in it did the trick for me.
and she’s been a customer of ours for years now,
to this day, she has no idea what was ailing her. The doctors didn’t know what was going on with her.
And elderberry syrup, for whatever reason, was the trick
that in her mind made her better. And I again. So that’s a story that was told to us. We are not touting elderberry syrup as this magic cure for anything, right? It’s just
it is immune boosting. We obviously know the facts behind that. But, when you hear stories like that, I mean, this woman was in tears, coming back to us, telling us the story.
I don’t know, it’s a little moving sometimes
when you get customers that are coming back crying to you, telling you that this elderberry syrup has helped them that much. And here we are. Oh, like these humble farmers growing this fruit.
it’s pretty amazing. Sometimes I wish I had some
in 2020.
When I got hit by that thing that was going around at the time. Yeah, yeah. And I threw everything at it from our aloe vera and all kinds of high vitamin C and my goodness, I was swallowing spoonful of garlic here and there and, you know, eaten everything potent. And not that I would expect a magic bullet, but I wish I had even more support in the form of elderberry, syrup.
Especially if it could slow down viral replication. Yeah. I’m going to guess you were probably, drinking it by the jar. We. Yeah, we took elderberry syrup
through the entire pandemic. Yeah, absolutely.
and our business really took off,
from Covid, but it obviously we take that back in a second if we could have circumvented those couple of years.
But,
federal government during that time, oddly enough, with all the pharmaceutical drugs they were trying to throw at us,
they really did put some serious dollars behind researching alternative medicines. And elderberry was one of those beneficiaries. And because of that, a lot of really good science has kind of come out, about elderberries and the benefits and the replication stoppage and things like that kind of really did come out of the Covid era,
of research that was done.
So. Oh, that’s great. That’s great. Do you have any, new product plans with elderberry? Yeah. So we have right now
the main two products,
our flagship product obviously is Elderberry syrup. We then a lot of customers were saying, hey, we’d like to buy some just juice from. Yeah, mix it in things, make our own concoctions
with elderberry juice.
So we started selling elderberry juice in the bottles. And then, elderberry gummies is probably going to be the next
on the line. Oh, wow. We really liked it. Elderberry gummies is one of those. They’re very handy. They’re portable. You can take them
wherever you’re going, you can throw in your suitcase. You can take it wherever you’re out and take your elderberry gummy.
The problem with elderberry gummies is that they’re even less potent than you know. It’s very difficult to pack
a decent dosage of elderberry into a gummy like that. And then the elderberry gummies even have more added sugars and more preservatives. So we are working with a company right now to try to develop a gummy that is just raw honey, elderberry juice
and gelatin just
to get the right mixture.
But we don’t want to add any, we don’t want to add preservatives or chemicals to it. We really want a as pure of a gummy as you can possibly get. And that currently does not exist on the market. The gummies that you buy today are really, it’s
almost to the candy point. Gelatin. Are you talking almost like bone stock?
That’s one thing we looked at. I don’t think that’s going to work for us, but, that would have been great. Yeah. To have that collagen and that bone stock would have been really good.
added
into the gummy. But, Yeah,
it’s gelatin or even fruit pectin. We’re looking at
to try to really get a, the gummy consistency, that has a good shelf life as well.
Okay. So now maybe we can get some of these, fruity colored cereal companies to start using some elderberry coloring. Yeah, yeah, you’re absolutely right. I actually, I’ve never considered that with everything that,
they’re doing right now with getting all those additives and the colors out, which is fantastic. I love the movement behind that. But elderberry would be a great color.
Pretty expensive. I think, because, there’s certainly some
cheaper food colorings out there. Elderberries. At least where we are today, in today’s market, that’d be a pretty costly endeavor. Yeah. Is it a good stain, though? Like, you know, the very tie dyes? It is fantastic. Yes.
to the point where it is a problem when we’re making elderberry syrup, it’s like, if you get it on your clothes and you get it on your apron, it’s not coming off.
I mean, our aprons are completely stained up for making elderberry syrup, so, Okay, I just invented a new, product for you. It’s going to be the merch page of Heartland Elderberry Farms. Tie dye, elderberry shirts. Oddly enough, Dr. Haley, I just realized, I saw a video a couple of weeks ago about how tie dye is made, and I had no idea that their shirts are basically twisted.
And, I had no clue about that. Yeah, we did that in school. Growing up, I never had bands all over these t shirts. Dump them in the buckets. Yeah, I’m all that. I. I didn’t have that same experience, but, I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. Who knows?
Maybe you’re on to something there with some elderberry tie dye.
Is there anything else I should have asked you? No, I think
you covered it pretty well.
would just say tell the viewers like, look, if you’re interested in elderberry syrup,
don’t take my word for it or what this podcast is about. Don’t take Dr.
Haley’s word for it.
Do your own research. Come to your own conclusions about elderberry and elderberry products. Right. So if you feel like that is something that you want to take for your family, in your family’s health,
then come on board and let’s do it. But then the second thing is, if you feel like elderberry products are right for you, I would then suggest to do your research a little bit deeper on what your elderberry product has
in the label.
Right. So just flip the label over, read the ingredients. And I think you’ll be surprised by some high dollar companies,
doing
some pretty marketing,
and having some dollar spent behind their marketing efforts to, to put out their product. And I think with a little bit of research, you can find some really, really solid elderberry products that are locally made and grown here in the United States.
there are vast differences in quality and potency of elderberry products. Well, that’s a good word. Do you have content channels where you’re teaching these things? Yeah. So we have, our Facebook page is this Heartland Elderberry
Farms We do have an Instagram page as well. And then our website is just at heartlandelderberryfarms.com
and on that website, there’s just a breadth of information, that, that we go into a lot of the science behind some stuff and, kind of dig into some competitors, like, hey, this is why us versus them?
kind of look at that aspect of it. Yeah. Well, we’ll have links to those for anyone that’s looking below the video on the blog page, wherever you are, if you’re listening to it on iTunes, it’ll be in there in the description.
You have to copy and paste, but I’ll have the links to your website and your social media channels. Man, I want to thank you. I feel like I know a lot more about both honey and elderberries now, and I want elderberry syrup in my cabinet and is it every day or just during flu season? What do you do?
my family takes it every day because okay, because of the antioxidant level, in all of the ingredients that we have, it is so beneficial for us to have that throughout the year. So we do it every day. There’s a lot of folks out there that take it just during the cold and flu season, just to kind of stay safe, but, so can’t go wrong either way.
If you guys feel like it’s right for you, but Dr. Haley, I certainly appreciate you having me on as well. It’s been a joy, great conversation. I loved it. Loved learning about
the aloe vera. I have taken aloe vera in the past. As a juice. And, so I, I I’ll bet you it’s the same thing.
No, it’s very similar. A lot of them have water in them as, primary ingredient. And they come from powders or, you know, they’ve been reprocessed and there’s a lot. So I have thickeners to make you think you have a gel. Yeah. So wild industry. And that’s how it is. And that’s why I love shows like this. When we find someone that’s actually making the products, I, you know, my favorite question.
What are the dirty secrets in the industry. What’s everyone else doing. And you learn about this and we can apply it not only to elderberry syrup, but when we’re in the grocery store and we’re thinking about what we might buy, and we look at the labels and we see, oh, wow, this primary ingredient is water. Yeah, exactly. I thought I was buying a, you know, ginger elixir and, you know, the number one thing is water.
that should be the ultimate red flag across the board. Yeah. You’re right. You’re absolutely right. Yeah. And then what are all these, you know, poly some kind of sorebates and all that. What are all these benzoates and stuff? Exactly. What does that mean? Not okay. Well, it’s not in there to boost your immune system.
If I can’t pronounce it, I don’t want it
Russell, thank you so much. Yeah, Dr. Haley,
good meeting you.
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