As we reflect on the last year, we want to share our most notable accomplishments and extend our gratitude to you. We could not have accomplished these things without your incredible support. Here are some of our favorite initiatives from 2025 and a peek at what’s coming up in 2026.
Free Herbalism Project℠: The In-Person Seattle Experience
In 2013, we launched the Free Herbalism Project event series to give back to herbalists and our botanical community. Since then, it has evolved into an ongoing series of in-person and Zoom educational events featuring visiting herbalists, how-to workshops, live music, and herbal tea to inspire community engagement and herbal learning--all free of charge. This year, we brought the event to Bastyr University in Seattle. Herbal experts Suzanne Tabert, Sajah Popham, Anjali Deva, and Nicole Telkes came to share their wisdom. We are looking forward to hosting at Bastyr again in 2026.
The Mountain Rose Herbs team published 123 blogs for our herbal community to enjoy and learn from last year. Topics included herbalism, natural hair care, DIY body care, culinary inspiration, sustainability happenings, and more!
These are the newly released blog posts you loved the most in 2025:
In 2025, our podcast hosts Tommy Nevar and Jiling Lin interviewed 48 esteemed herbalists like Rosemary Gladstar, Matthew Wood, Lucretia VanDyke, RuthAnn Thorn, Asia Suler, and many more. You can listen to all the 2025 episodes on our Herbal Radio webpage.
Our commitment to the best care and cultivation standards includes the hardworking people who grow our herbs and spices, so we maintain comprehensive Fair for Life and For Life certifications. These raise the bar on traditional fair trade certifications by applying fair-for-all principles that ensure human rights and equitable working conditions at every stage in the supply chain. We are proud to report that, in our 2025 audit, we received our highest score to date!
We have long maintained a Fair Trade certification, but we realized that these protections would also be useful for our wildcrafter partners. This year, we added our first FairWild Certified offerings to our product line and have been hard at work to help bring FairWild Certification to the United States. *Read more in the "Looking Ahead" section below.
Regenerative agriculture strives to not just avoid further damage to the environment and farmland but actively improve it. This approach is deeply holistic and often appears to work in concert with nature instead of fighting against it for production. Core concepts that are achieved through the various requirements and standards are building soil health, increasing biodiversity of farmland, and supporting the workers from whom all this is made possible. This year, we added eleven ROC botanical offerings to our product line.
For the last several years, we have been on a journey to source more of our offerings from the United States. While there are botanicals that we simply cannot grow here, we are committed to sourcing more of what we can from the US. In doing this, we are better supporting American farmers, helping local economies, lowering our carbon footprint, and helping to strengthen farm partnerships.
Since starting this initiative, we have dramatically increased our domestic contracts and funded multiple collaborative research projects aimed to support and improve domestic herbal crops. We continue to work towards increasing our support of American organic farmers through collaborative and reciprocal partnerships. You can explore our growing line of US Grown Offerings here.
In 2025, we launched some exciting (and long-awaited) products. Our new line of organic flavor extracts made its debut during the holidays and was reported to be a well-loved additional to family meals shared around the country. We also launched two new tea samplers Yerba Mate and Family Tea Sampler, and our Oregon Trio Tea Sampler. We're incredibly proud of these new teas, which primarily feature teas we source from the US. We also added a cosmetic line which offers natural solutions for those who love to naturally highlight their beauty.
The Mountain Rose Herbs Mercantile Eugene celebrated its 9th anniversary, and the Mountain Rose Herbs Mercantile Seattle celebrated its 1-year anniversary in 2025. We had a fun day of celebrating each store with refreshments, entertainment, prizes, and discounts.
We are always looking for ways to prioritize our team’s health and well-being. Here are the ways we accomplished that this year:
Supporting our community through financial contributions, in-kind donations, and volunteer hours is a core part of our company culture. Since botanicals are our passion, we give in ways that care for the plants: investing in clean water and healthy soil. In 2025, we focused our giving on local community organizations like Cascadia Wildlands, Beyond Toxics, Friends of Trees, Cascades Raptor Center, and Oregon Wild because we have seen the work they do here in our community over many years, and we know they share our values and goals and act on them in tangible ways.
As you can see, 2025 was a busy year here at Mountain Rose Herbs, and we have even loftier goals for 2026. We will, of course, continue the programs we started and improved in 2025, and we will be launching a few new ones. This is only a small sneak peek of what's ahead, so please stay tuned for more!
When we became a FairWild business in 2024, we proudly began offering FairWild Organic Myrrh Gum Resin and Frankincense Resin. While this was a huge and important step for us, we realized that harvesters from the United States could also be supported by this system. After assessing which plants were at a higher risk of exploitation, the skill level required to harvest certain plants; and the pain points harvesters face when working with them.
In the coming months, you can expect to see new US Grown FairWild Certified offerings, including pipsissewa, yerba santa, and usnea. We are truly proud of the efforts that went into making this happen, and it fills us with joy to know that there are other business allies who are also doing their part to help improve the livelihoods of domestic wildcrafters and the ecosystems they harvest from.
We will be releasing another 14 new Regenerative Organic Certified extracts in 2026 and will continue to work hand-in-hand with our farm partners to expand our ROC herbs, spices, and extract offerings.
In 2026, Mountain Rose Herbs is improving its paid vacation hour package for staff. We believe that work-life balance is very important, and this is one of the ways we give our employees more opportunities to fill their proverbial cups in their personal time.
And last but not least, we will continue sharing more free educational content, and maybe even on a new platform! (Stay tuned for an exciting announcement on that!) Each week, you can explore our new free resources, recipes, and podcasts to further you along your herbal journey.