A birthday letter to the community that made it possible.

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In the late 1960s, Santa Fe was a different kind of place. The city had always sat at a crossroads between Spanish colonial history, deep Indigenous roots, and high desert light that painters had been chasing for decades. But by 1969, something else was moving through it and people were questioning things like what they ate and what they took when they were sick. They were looking for something older and truer, and Santa Fe, with its adobe walls and long memory, felt like a place where you might actually find it.

That's where Michael Moore opened his apothecary.

It wasn't much to look at. It was a small shop filled with glass jars of roots, leaves, flowers, and tinctures, the smell of dried herbs and earth in the air where people gathered around a counter asking questions that doctors hadn't had time for. It was a place to learn, share, and get bags of fresh plants or tinctures made from the plants Moore had spent years learning about in the field by walking the desert canyons of the Southwest, studying the Eclectic and Physiomedicalist physicians whose clinical knowledge of plants had been largely forgotten, and learning from the Indigenous communities who had never stopped knowing these things in the first place.

Michael Moore's practice was rooted in a single question: what does the body actually need?

We're thinking about him today because Herbs, Etc. turns 57, and the principles behind how we make herbal medicine remain remarkably consistent. In a world where the supplement industry has been bought, rebranded, consolidated, and scaled into a $196 billion category, everything he was working against has only gotten louder, and everything he built has only gotten more relevant.

Today, the herbal supplement world looks very different (can you guess what Moore would say?). The industry has grown and the way people discover wellness has transformed. Which means Herbs, Etc. has evolved too - although some things are never meant to change. 

We're still building formulas from a foundation of botanical medicine and a materia medica that took decades to learn. The plant’s bioregion, how it was harvested, what happens to its chemistry in the hours after cutting - these aren't sourcing details. They're the difference between a formula that works and one that just looks like it should.

The Student Who Stayed

In 1979, a young man named Daniel Gagnon arrived in Santa Fe from Northern Ontario for a year-long study of alternative healing modalities. He'd grown up with asthma, eczema, and allergies that conventional medicine had managed but never resolved, and that experience had sent him looking for something else. Michael Moore was one of his teachers. Daniel fell in love with the way Moore taught; the way he talked about the plants, the rigor and the reverence in the same breath, and asked if he could stay on as his apprentice.

He never left.

Daniel spent years as Moore's apprentice and assistant, learning to formulate the way Moore had taught: start with the health need, then the plant, then the extraction, then the clinical validation. In 1982, Moore passed the business to him. Daniel didn't just preserve what Moore built, he deepened it. He went back to school, completing graduate-level work in herbal medicine and eventually earning a Master of Science with a thesis on the antimicrobial properties of plant compounds against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He co-authored peer-reviewed research, served on the boards that built safety standards for the entire herbal industry, founded the Botanical Research and Education Institute, wrote several books on plant medicine, and taught clinical herbalism to practitioners and nursing students for decades.

This is what "medical herbalist" means; it’s a rigorous, scientific, and ancestral discipline, and it's the foundation that everything we make is built on.

What's Always Been Different About How We Make Things

Most supplement companies start with dried plant material from across the sea. We don't.

Most of our formulas are made from organic fresh, whole plants, extracted within 24 hours of harvest. That window matters because the chemistry of a plant changes the moment it's cut. Volatile compounds evaporate, enzymes begin to break down constituents, and so what you have on day one is not what you have on day ten.

We work with conscious farmers and wildharvesters who know these plants in the field not as commodities, but as living systems that require specific harvesting times, conditions, and handling. That relationship takes years to build and can't be replicated by switching suppliers for a better price.

We formulate from knowledge and how the science of the body works. When a new ingredient becomes popular, we don't rush to add it to a label. We ask whether the clinical record supports the claim, whether we can source it correctly, and whether our herbalists believe it will actually do what we'd be asking it to do.

This is slow and deliberate. And it's why formulas like ChlorOxygen®, Respiratonic®, Deep Health®, and Singer's Saving Grace® have been in continuous production for decades, because they work.

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57 Years and Constantly Evolving

ChlorOxygen® has been our flagship chlorophyll concentrate for decades built on the molecular relationship between chlorophyll and hemoglobin, the closest analogy in plant biology to your body's own oxygen-transport system. When we launched ChlorOxygen® Lemonade Powder earlier this year, we didn't change the formula, just the format. Four months later, it won Superfood Product of the Year at the 2026 Mindful Awards. We were grateful for that, and the formula had already earned its place for a long time.

We've been asking the same question since: how do we make something feel less clinical and more enjoyable, because we know that if you enjoy taking something, you'll actually take it. Many people grew up on vitamin gummies, so gummies carry a childhood nostalgia that shifts the psychological friction from "I'm sick" to something that feels like a treat. And there's nothing wrong with that. The best herbal formula in the world only works if you take it!

So this October, we couldn't be more thrilled to introduce Deep Sleep Infused Herbal Gummies and a brand new product: Daily Peace Infused Herbal Gummies. These are full-dose gummies with a jelly filling that brings a botanical burst to your day. It’s the same question Moore was asking in 1969, showing up in a form that fits how people actually live now.

To the Community That's Been Here

None of this works without the people who've trusted us with their health.

The practitioners who've recommended our formulas to their patients for decades. The families who've reached for Immune Alert™ at the first sign of something coming. The longtime customers who drove across town to the Santa Fe apothecary for over 50 years. The herbalists trained in Michael Moore's tradition who carry this knowledge forward in their own practices.

You're the reason we've had 57 years to get this right.

Somewhere, there's still a jar of roots and a counter with good answers. The apothecary walls are different now and some of the formats have a new spin. But the question is the same one Moore was asking since 1969; what does the body actually need?  And we're still working every day to answer it.

Happy birthday to Herbs, Etc. And thank you, genuinely, to everyone who's been part of what it is. Here’s to the next chapter!

In herbal gratitude,

Herbs, Etc.

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Herbalist-formulated since 1969. Made from fresh whole plants. Built for the long game.