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Rodney Perdew’s 20-year love affair with moringa began with an article in the Los Angeles Times in March, 2000. Struck by the title, “A Common Tree With Rare Power,” Perdew recalls thinking, “‘Wow, this is interesting!’” As he continued to read, he was even more intrigued: “What? It does this? It does that? Are you kidding me?!”
Perdew could hardly believe the moringa tree’s healing and nutritional properties. The plant is used as a remedy for conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, anemia, arthritis, and malnutrition, among many others, and its leaves are rich in protein, Vitamin C, Vitamin A, iron, calcium, potassium, and more. He wanted to get his hands on some moringa as soon as possible. “I was off to the races!” he says.
Rodney Perdew, Owner, Moringa Farms
But try as he might, he couldn’t find a single moringa tree or product in the U.S. Even his friend Bob Nichols who was in the health food business had never heard of it. “I found out nobody knew what it was,” he says. “You couldn’t get it anywhere. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, somebody oughta bring it over here!’”
So that’s exactly what he did. He contacted the forestry department in Kenya and got some seeds. Then, with the help of Nichols, he connected with an herbal distribution business in India, the tree’s native habitat, and started importing the leaf powder. In 2001, he created a direct-to-consumer company, Moringa Farms, and began selling his products online. He says an organic version of the leaf powder wasn’t available at first, but once it was, and he was able to locate a trustworthy supplier, he began carrying it.
Organic moringa root
For the first 10 years, Perdew says, business was slow. As far as he knew, there were only three purveyors of moringa in the whole country. But in the last decade, things have really heated up as word about the tree and its health benefits have spread.
Organic moringa powder is now widely available, and the market for moringa is only expected to increase in the coming years. According to an Insight Partners research report, sales of moringa products in the U.S. are forecast to have a compound annual growth rate of 8.5 percent between 2019 and 2027.
Jazmin Jaleh, founder and CEO of Shining Seas Imports, attributes organic moringa’s popularity to its health benefits and the growing consumer demand for natural remedies. “People in the West are now taking control of their own preventative health by making better decisions [about] what goes into their body instead of taking a medication to counteract the damage that has already been done,” says Jaleh. “Moringa is an excellent example of food as medicine. … [It] is essentially a multivitamin from nature.”
Shining Seas Imports is a leading distributor of organic moringa leaf powder
Today, Jaleh’s Shining Seas Imports is a leading distributor of organic moringa leaf powder in the U.S., supplying Perfectly Natural Herbs and Moringa Source, among many other retailers. Shining Seas is partnered with Grenera Nutrients, an Indian company that was the first major moringa producer and exporter in the world and which currently has an annual supply capacity of 300,000 kilograms.
Jaleh, who has a background in the tea industry, founded Shining Seas Imports in 2014 after learning about moringa the previous year. At that time, she says, “there were less than a handful of companies selling actual moringa products online, but there were pages of research on the benefits of the plant.” So she started her company in partnership with Grenera in order to “bring moringa to market on a mass scale to supply all major superfood and tea companies.” Within just a few years, she says, “moringa easily became the next big ‘superfood.’”
Organic moringa seeds
Shining Seas Imports exclusively supplies organic moringa because “organic is always the better choice to maintain human health and environmental sustainability,” says Jaleh. And the demand is there too, she adds, because consumers interested in moringa are extremely health conscious: “When optimal health is driving the decision-making, buying organic is really the only option.”
While Jaleh is a strong proponent of organic certification, she says the organic seal doesn’t necessarily mean a moringa powder is safe or high quality since it could still have an elevated heavy metal or bacterial content. Perdew shares this concern, and both Shining Seas Imports and Moringa Farms consistently test their powders for quality.
Rodney Perdew educates volunteers on growing moringa
Perdew now has his eyes on a new organic moringa market—the fresh leaves, which are regularly consumed in countries like the Philippines, Kenya, and India. He’s been scoping out land in Puerto Rico for a certified organic operation there and is also interested in growing fresh moringa in geothermal greenhouses in the U.S.
In Nicolaus, California, just north of Sacramento, Justin Eve, founder of 7 Generations Producers, has been growing and selling fresh certified organic moringa leaves for the past three years. He cultivates the trees permaculture-style in a greenhouse with several symbiotic crops—strawberries, borage, and garlic. He says he decided to grow fresh organic moringa because of its nutritional benefits and because to his knowledge, nobody else in North America was doing it (he says people erroneously think the tree doesn’t grow well here). He lives in an area with significant Indian and Filipino populations, so he says there is a strong demand at local farmers markets for the fresh leaves, which are used in soups, teas, and stir fry.
Justin Eve, Founder, 7 Generations Producers
Eve hopes to soon become certified as an organic processor, so he can start selling domestically grown organic moringa powder. While Perdew is skeptical that a U.S. moringa powder could be financially viable, Eve disagrees. He says the plant grows about a foot per week and estimates he can produce the powder at a cost of $3 per pound and then sell it to wholesalers for $12.50.
Overall, Eve’s outlook for organic moringa in the U.S. is bright. He says people who are from cultures where fresh moringa leaves are regularly consumed “buy as much as they can get their hands on.” And when it comes to the organic leaf powder and the seed oil (which also has health benefits), he expects the demand to be extremely robust: “I believe just as big as hemp and cannabis [are] today, moringa will be equally as large for a dietary supplement and health product.”
