After we talked about the cultivation and planting of the fields with our neem trees on our farm “El Retiro” in our previous blog post , we now go one step further on the way of neem into the care cream . We've mentioned many times that our secret weapon in our psoriasis skincare products is our proprietary neem leaf extract. But how exactly does it come about?

 

Part 2: From leaf to neem extract

How our neem leaf extract is created from neem leaves

As the name suggests, the extract's origin is the leaf of the neem tree. The neem trees grow quickly and therefore need to be cut; the branches are cut from the lower part of the tree. These have leaves that do not end up as green waste, but are further processed as valuable raw materials.

 

Preparation for the extraction process

The sheets are transported to our newly built production hall, which was planned and built by a German engineer. We have new, state-of-the-art machines available in the hall that allow us to process large quantities of neem leaves efficiently. Once here, the leaves are first washed in a washing machine to remove any kind of contamination. 

They are then gently dried in specially made drying boxes for two days, as the leaves are sensitive to heat and the valuable ingredients of the neem leaf could be damaged if the heat is too high.

 

 

Ultimately, the dried leaves are ground, packaged and sent to Germany.

 

 

 

 

The creation of our neem leaf extract

Since the valuable plant ingredients of the neem leaves, such as the nimbolides, are relevant to us and not the leaves as a whole, it is important to extract these plant substances and make them available in concentrated form for further processing. For this purpose, the leaves are delivered to our partner company in Bavaria, where the neem leaf extract is produced from the neem leaves. For this we use  supercritical CO2 extraction. This process and the precise and specially developed parameters are currently being patented  (As of January 2023) and concentrates the active ingredients from the leaves by a factor of 100. The resulting extract resembles a dark green, very viscous paste that smells of fresh leaves. The extract is then standardized to a defined value so that it can be easily processed into cosmetics. 

We get 8 kilograms of neem leaf extract from 1000 kilograms of fresh leaves.

 

In the next part (Part 3) you will find out how the extract (after thorough testing) becomes part of our psoriasis care cream .