Exploring Young Living's Deep Spectra Technology

A year ago, Young Living revealed its patents-pending Deep Spectra technology. Now all the tests and tinkerings are turning into products you can share. Brad Chatterley is on the podcast today to explain the Deep Spectra extraction technique and talk about the possibilities on the horizon for this next generation of essential oils. And it will all be right here at Young Living, the exclusive home for Deep Spectra. Hello and welcome to Young Living's podcast, The Wild Drop. My name is Jacob Young, your host. Young Living is the world leader in producing and distributing premium essential oils, and this podcast will provide you with drops of information about Young Living, including stories, history, product information, lots of little fun facts, and even more. Well, Brad, we're super excited to have you back here in the podcast room. You always bring some exciting stuff to the table. This time it's in regards to Deep Spectrum. I want to know what's kind of new with Deep Spectra this year. We had, I guess, what you could call a hard launch where we actually brought it back as a permanent product, and we're now starting to introduce it into other products as well. Yeah. Yeah, so this year at convention, we had two new Deep Spectra-based products. And last year in 2023, these were limited-time-only products, and they were limited because we produced them here, basically, in the lab at... headquarters in HK's lab. HK Lin is our chief scientist here. And, you know, that's not a sustainable way to keep producing the product. So in the last year, we've been working on how do we actually take that lab scale production and turn it into like a full scale production down at our manufacturing. So that's what we've been working on and then developing the two new products. Fantastic. Yeah. So because it's a brand new technology, There's still a lot of questions and a lot of curiosity behind this brand new technology. So in a sense, like what is deep spectra? Why are we now going to deep spectra when we've had these oils for, you know, two decades, essentially? Great question. I think that's what everybody always wants to know at first is like, well, what is it exactly? Yeah. I think the best way to think about it is it is a technology. It's an extraction technology. And The reason that we're doing this, we looked at developing this new technology, is because we've known, your dad knew a long time ago, that plants have other beneficial compounds besides the essential oils. And I like to remind people that have been around for a while of VitaGreens. That was the very first product that combined dried herbs with essential oils. And the concept there that your dad talked about was putting the lifeblood, the essential as the lifeblood, back into those dried herbs. But the dried herbs themselves have good beneficial compounds in them. So, you know, we're experts in steam distillation and growing of aromatic plants. And we know that steam distillation only pulls out those volatile compounds that we call essential oils. And volatile doesn't mean, like, unstable. It just means that they're lighter compounds that evaporate off. And so we've been thinking for years, maybe even decades, of this company is how do we get even more benefit out of the plant? And so that's where this concept came from. And HK, who did a lot of research in the academic world on frankincense and other plant compounds, got really invested in this. So he started doing lots of research in the lab. to see how maybe we could go about pulling more compounds out of the plant. And I guess to answer the question, what is it? It's an extraction technology where we use essential oils as the extraction liquid to pull compounds out of the plant that don't come through in steam distillation. And frankincense is a really good place to start. And that was one of our permanent launches this year was frankincense squared. And we call it frankincense squared because it's using two types of frankincense. We have frankincense essential oil, and then we have frankincense resin. And this is an oversimplification of the process of explaining it, but you basically combine the two. So you take the resin and you put it in the oil, and that oil is acting as the thing that is pulling additional compounds out of the resin. And one of the main ones we were looking at were boswellic acids. Boswellic acids don't come through very well in steam distillation, if at all, and so they're often left behind in the spent resin. And by doing... We actually use the oil to pull those boswellic acids out of the resin. So then what you end up with is kind of this supercharged essential oil that has all the benefits of the oil itself, plus those additional compounds that we've brought over into it. And then you remove at the end whatever plant material is left over, filter it, and you kind of have this supercharged oil. So that's what it is. We change the oil. We change the plant material that we're working with. We're done. We're doing lots of more research and experimentation on different combinations, but that's kind of a simple explanation of what the technology is. Yeah. And when it comes to that extraction, you're talking about combining two different things to get one amazing thing. That extraction method, what is that exactly? Is that a boil? Is that a press? Is that a... Yeah, good question. It's really some... Well, I think it's a good question. There's two aspects to it. One is what kind of properties does that oil have and what kind of properties does the plant material have where the oil will actually act as a good compound for drying out those other beneficial compounds in the plant material. So understanding what the oil does, like how it works in those kind of chemical applications is beneficial. And then the other part is there can be energy added to that process. So that energy could be something as simple as just agitating it, stirring it, which allows for more access and more of that plant material breakdown. There can be some sonication there where that's something we've played with is sonication, which actually helps break down the cell walls even more so things can be extracted even better. We can look at, like, this is what's so cool about Deep Spectra is there's so many. ways, there's so many, like, I guess, factors to play with with it, from the species of oil, the species of plant to the energy source that you're adding to that combination to help bring out the best. And it could be a little bit of warmth, you know, steam is relatively warm. So if you keep it that temperature, you know, below the level of, you know, where the steam has been, you're not going to get probably any degradation of that. But that's something that we would look at. Um, and there are, and you could look at even adding pressure to it. That's not something we've done yet, but these are all just ideas that we're kicking around to see, okay, what, what's going to work best in this process to get the best results out of it. We're always tinkering. Yeah. So another question I have then, because when it comes to like our standard steam distillation, the way that we extract the oil is through a separator because the oil either has a lower density or higher density than water. So it sits above or below the water. So how does that extraction process go since you're combining these and then extracting what you've created essentially out of that? Yeah. So in steam distillation, you can think of steam as like the solvent almost that's pulling the essential oil out of the plant material. And when you're separating them, you're taking the oil out. So you're kind of you're removing the solvent, that water that acted as the solvent in a steam form. is being removed from what you wanted to extract. And, you know, there are, like, solvents that are used a lot in extraction that we don't do here at Young Living. So the ethanol is often used as a solvent. And in that process, they add the plant material to the solvent. And then when it's extracted what they want from it, they evaporate that ethanol off or that solvent off. So there's often this process of removing what you used as the extraction liquid. But that's what's unique about Deep Spectra, is that we don't remove that extraction liquid because that extraction liquid itself is beneficial. And so the only thing that's being taken out of it is if there's plant material left over at the end of the process, then we pull that out and we filter it, and you have those other compounds from the plant that are now basically suspended in a solution with that beneficial essential oil. And it's awesome that you talk about that because in a way we're trying to find how we can use 100% of the plant, right? Yeah. I don't know what the exact number is or percentages per se, but I know, you know, what's so amazing about this is it's completely opposite from how the pharmaceutical world goes about collecting, you know, isotopes or compounds and then, you know, creating a pharmaceutical drug out of it. Yeah. And I'd kind of love you to, if you could dive into that on what makes this so... different than what you would find in like your typical store-bought drug. Okay. Yeah. So it's interesting. I actually read an article probably six months ago about some research that they were doing at a university. on a Boswellia extract. And Boswellia is the family or the genus of frankincense. And so they had done this extract, and they actually did a clinical trial with this extract, and they had found it to be effective. And the clinical trial itself was interesting, but for this discussion, what I found most interesting is they talked about what their next steps were. And so they saw this encouraging result. And their next step was that they wanted to isolate what in that, like the specific thing in that extract that was having the impact that they were seeing. And once they isolated that, they would do further tests on that. And then if it continued to be effective, they could maybe move it into the next phase, which would be to synthesize it. And then when they've synthesized it, they can patent it and it can be turned into like a medicine. One of the things that was fascinating about that was that they said they were having a hard time isolating which one was having the effect, which reminds me of a topic in the herbal world, which is botanical synergy. So you know essential oils, other herbal extracts, are mixtures of hundreds of compounds. And so when you have hundreds of compounds, you have them working in multiple pathways, right? So it's not just one compound, one receptor site that it's impacting. You have all of these different ones. And a really cool thing that can happen in that is this phrase called botanical synergy. And what botanical synergy is, is let's say you have compound A and compound B, right? This one does something. This one does something. If you add them together. you might expect them to just kind of do those two things, but together. Sometimes when you add them together, they do even more than they do as you look at the two of them separately. And so it's when you get more than that additive effect is what's called a synergistic effect. And that's why I think this process and this deep spectra process is so exciting because it's like, well, people can say, well, it sounds like a cool process, but what does that mean for me? Well, instead of trying to isolate down and get to a single molecule, we actually, with Deep Spectra, are taking things and adding more to it. So we're adding even more. And the coolest result that I've seen so far is a test that HK did. This is just an in vitro test, which means that it was done in a Petri dish. So it's not a clinical trial or anything, but it was a really cool, encouraging result, which was that he compared the antioxidant. activity of frankincense essential oil to the frankincense squared. And what he found was that the frankincense squared showed a 4.6 times higher antioxidant activity in the petri dish than frankincense essential oil alone. So to me, that is an encouraging and promising result that points towards a botanically synergistic impact that we're getting with deep spectra technology, which I think is really, really exciting. That is amazing to hear. And I actually haven't heard that number before. I had heard HK was talking about that there was a significant improvement and enhancement over that, but I didn't know it was to that extent, which is just fascinating to see. And we're still in the early years of development, studying, evaluation, all of that with deep spectra. So there's a lot more to come from it. And there's so much more that we need to explore, like you said, the combinations. I mean, we've only really looked into it, you know, five oils deep, essentially. Yeah. And we have 500 or something like that. That's right. And so, you know, there's so much to be done and so much that can be done, which is amazing. And one thing that we haven't really talked about is this extraction method is us. No one else can do it. We have patents for it, which is also phenomenal. No one else can claim this technology. We thought of it first, we did it first, we have it, and we're the only ones to have it as well. And we talk about innovation on this podcast so much, how my dad and HK and many others were so far ahead of their time. Well, you should stop by my office sometime and see all of the, and maybe you have them too, but, you know, HK running down the hallway to my office with a little amber bottle labeled of Deep Specter, I probably have. I don't know, 20 or 30 bottles of just different things that he's been playing around with. He's having a lot of fun in there. Yeah, he is. So what are the next steps for Deep Spectra then? What are we hoping to do within the next few years? What are we hoping to discover? What's kind of the base plan that we have? Yeah. So what I think our customers are going to see with this is what we did at convention this year, we launched a standalone, I'm calling it a standalone deep spectra extract, right? That's like what you see in a typical five mil bottle, our essential oil bottles, that's the frankincense squared. So you have the whole extract there in your bottle. Then we also launched phytonutrition here in the US, which is a dietary supplement based round. Black seed oil, which is a fantastic fatty oil from the Najea Sativa plant. Frankincense Square Deep Spectra Extract. And Orange Cacao Deep Spectra Extract, where we used orange essential oil to extract compounds from the cacao beans. Cacao beans, which, by the way, are grown at our farm in Ecuador. The species native to Ecuador, chosen by your dad specifically to grow there. So... That is an example of what you'll see more of where we have a nutrition product, but it has deep spectra ingredients inside of it. And then we're looking now at, you know, applications in personal care as well. So I think what people will see is this expansion into all three of these areas and maybe even more product categories. So standalone ones, you could see blends of deep spectra extracts, just like we have blends of essential oils. You'll see nutrition products that have deep spectra extracts inside of them. And you'll see personal care products that have deep spectra extracts inside of them. And we'll see where we go from there because it's exciting. We don't even know yet all the possibilities that are out there for this. It's our child, and we're watching it grow up throughout the years. I'm going to be most fascinated with the blends personally. The little time that I had in R&D working with Rex Kidman on blends and learning and understanding of the chemistry and the blend and the dance that the oils do together to kind of coexist with one another inside the blend and then work as a blend just fascinates me. And so I'd be curious to see how something that has more structure to it works with other essential oils because we don't know what that's going to be like. We know what oils play well together and what oils don't. play well together and what's more difficult to blend with because of all the research and the studying and the trial and error that my dad did. And now it's kind of like, we have to start that all over again, which is exciting to me. I'm super excited for that. It is. It's exciting. It's fun. It is hard work. But I think one of the things that stands out to me is how this came about really because of our expertise in essential oils, because of our expertise. in steam distillation and how that process works. I mean, we have 30 years of building our own distilleries, growing our own aromatic plants, understanding the distillation process and what's happening there. I mean, your dad was always tinkering with, you know, the equipment, the shape of, you know, the pipe as it comes out of the distiller, the condenser. And we still do that and make improvements today. But like that 30 years of expertise and then the fact that we have our own labs, right? We have our R&D lab here. We have the quality lab in Spanish Fork. We have PhD chemists. We have PhD immunologists now with Mark Bartlett, biologists with HK Lin. We are uniquely positioned to do this research and come up with this process in a way that I think no other. probably no other company in the world is. It's really an outgrowth of that 30 years of experience and expertise that we've developed over those three decades. And it just makes it so exciting. Now, you talked about how HK Lin kind of started all of this inside his lab. I know we can't get like too in depth, otherwise we'd be here for a long, long time. But if you could kind of explain the general gist of taking a laboratory application and process and making it a consumer application, kind of that transition of, okay, we've done it inside the laboratory. Now, what does it look like going into full production? You know, taking it from a very small scale to a very large scale. Yeah. Cause I've had people ask, you know, why did it take so long? Why did it take another year to get stuff out to us? And when you're doing lab scale production, you're doing, you're working with small volumes, right? You might have like a liter. container that you're working in or maybe five liters or something. But when we're talking about large scale production, we want to move to, you know, it could be a 50 liter extraction drum or something like that. So the equipment that's used in a lab is going to be very different than the equipment that's used in a larger scale production. Even things like filtration, like when you're Filtering, you know, five kilos of something, a process might work at that scale, but when you're filtering 50 kilos of something, that same process doesn't necessarily work. So luckily we have process engineers. They came up and looked at what HK was doing in his lab, took notes on all that, asked lots of questions, and then they went back to the warehouse and they said, or the manufacturing facility, they said, okay, what equipment do we have that's going to accomplish this same thing? So they get the equipment, they follow the process as much as they can with that equipment, and then they run pilot batches, right? So the pilot batch is to see, is the equipment working? Is the process working? And then we have to do testing. Because when you're doing something brand new like Deep Spectra, HK did his extractions, and he would have an idea of what we were pulling, say, out of the frankincense resin, but you have to test. to make sure. So there's a test for, to identify what you're extracting. And then there's tests for quantifying what you're extracting. And they're not always the same test. And you might have to figure out what test is going to work best for that. And then there's tests like he did that antioxidant test. There's tests for effectiveness. So like, what is this actually doing? What is this helping? Well, all those tests then need to be duplicated again. when you've done your pilot batch at the larger scale, because you want to make sure that the way you're doing it at a larger scale is providing the same results as what you saw at the lab scale. And then if there's any changes that you need to make to the process, then you have to redo all of that again. So it's really this kind of iterative process where you try it, you test it, you look at the results, you go and you make some changes, you try it again, you test it again. So it's a long process. It takes a while, but that's the right way to do it to make sure that we're getting the same quality and the quality that we expect from ourselves and that our customers expect from us. Yeah, duplication is not easy, especially when you're increasing the ratio size. It's not necessarily like 4x-ing it or 5x-ing it. I think a lot of people kind of mistake it as like, oh, well, say I'm making a meal for four people, but I have 12 people coming over. I just, you know. x3 that essentially you know 3x that it's similar to that but in a in a way you know you're also adding a lot more variables into it as well yeah um and like you said you know you you've got to figure out the duplication process how are we able to take what we've had in the lab and then make it a full-blown production and we're creating you know 50x quantity size volume etc and then how do we refine that how we perfect it and how do we make sure that each time we you do this it's perfect right yeah and sometimes it's the smallest things that are the trickiest things right i know with some of the tests that i've done with tyler in the lab for some of our gc testing with the lavender and b research that we've been doing we were off i think on one of these like point zero zero four something like that like just a very very small number yeah but when we went back at our other tests everything lined up so we had to go back and back and back and back and we were there for like two three hours just to make up a point zero zero zero four difference but then we finally got it right yeah and it was the smallest thing and it came down to like a a timing error essentially so we know that at a certain time at a certain peak certain temperature that we expect this compound to come out at this amount and there's a lot of other variables that come into play but i i also think that's kind of the the best thing about us, right, is I know some of our customers and brand partners and myself complain, why does everything take so long to come to market? It's because we want the best. And we're never going to give you something that's half finished. So I think a lot of people probably have this question, we've kind of explained what is deep spectra, what's so amazing about it. But I think, like deep spectra, where this is a new generation of essential oils, like with a new car. or a new phone that comes out, why would people want to upgrade? Why would people want to buy? Yeah, that's a great question. And, like, it's not to say there's not a place for frankincense essential oil, right? We love frankincense essential oil. It is great. One thing that you'd still want to use that for is... diffusing. Frankincense squared, don't diffuse it. Those heavy molecules, those boswellic acids aren't going to come out in your diffuser. You're just going to be leaving them there in the bottom. So there is a place for both, but why upgrade? For me, it really comes back to that botanical synergy concept. You have all of these compounds coming together really as nature created them, right? In the ratios that nature created them in that plant, that does something more for you. We're seeing that in those test results, that 4.6 time increase in the antioxidant activity. This is the benefit. It's nature giving you even more compounds that are going to be even more effective for your health and wellness. And that's why I'm so excited about this because I think it really is going to do so much more for people. Absolutely. And you won't know unless you try it. That's right. Well, Brad, thank you so much for your time, passion, dedication, everything that you do. I just know that you and your team and everybody else involved with Deep Spectrum and all the other products that we've got going on. Uh, just do a phenomenal job and everyone is so appreciative with what we've been seeing come out recently. Just super proud of the team and, uh, always love having you come on cause you have, you're just a wealth of information and, uh, you do a great way of kind of sharing it and explaining it with everybody else. So I love being here. Thank you. Till next time. And thank you for tuning into this episode of the wild drop. Remember you can listen on iTunes, Spotify on YouTube and our website, www.youngliving.com. Don't forget to oil up young living family. This. This is Jacob Young, dropping out. Take care.

And it will all be right here at Young Living, the exclusive home for Deep Spectra. Hello and welcome to Young Living's podcast, The Wild Drop. My name is Jacob Young, your host. Young Living is the world leader in producing and distributing premium essential oils, and this podcast will provide you with drops of information about Young Living, including stories, history, product information, lots of little fun facts, and even more.

Well, Brad, we're super excited to have you back here in the podcast room. You always bring some exciting stuff to the table. This time it's in regards to Deep Spectrum. I want to know what's kind of new with Deep Spectra this year.

We had, I guess, what you could call a hard launch where we actually brought it back as a permanent product, and we're now starting to introduce it into other products as well. Yeah. Yeah, so this year at convention, we had two new Deep Spectra-based products.

And last year in 2023, these were limited-time-only products, and they were limited because we produced them here, basically, in the lab at... headquarters in HK's lab. HK Lin is our chief scientist here. And, you know, that's not a sustainable way to keep producing the product. So in the last year, we've been working on how do we actually take that lab scale production and turn it into like a full scale production down at our manufacturing.

So that's what we've been working on and then developing the two new products. Fantastic. Yeah. So because it's a brand new technology, There's still a lot of questions and a lot of curiosity behind this brand new technology. So in a sense, like what is deep spectra?

Why are we now going to deep spectra when we've had these oils for, you know, two decades, essentially? Great question. I think that's what everybody always wants to know at first is like, well, what is it exactly? Yeah. I think the best way to think about it is it is a technology.

It's an extraction technology. And The reason that we're doing this, we looked at developing this new technology, is because we've known, your dad knew a long time ago, that plants have other beneficial compounds besides the essential oils. And I like to remind people that have been around for a while of VitaGreens. That was the very first product that combined dried herbs with essential oils.

And the concept there that your dad talked about was putting the lifeblood, the essential as the lifeblood, back into those dried herbs. But the dried herbs themselves have good beneficial compounds in them. So, you know, we're experts in steam distillation and growing of aromatic plants. And we know that steam distillation only pulls out those volatile compounds that we call essential oils.

And volatile doesn't mean, like, unstable. It just means that they're lighter compounds that evaporate off. And so we've been thinking for years, maybe even decades, of this company is how do we get even more benefit out of the plant?

And so that's where this concept came from. And HK, who did a lot of research in the academic world on frankincense and other plant compounds, got really invested in this. So he started doing lots of research in the lab.

to see how maybe we could go about pulling more compounds out of the plant. And I guess to answer the question, what is it? It's an extraction technology where we use essential oils as the extraction liquid to pull compounds out of the plant that don't come through in steam distillation. And frankincense is a really good place to start.

And that was one of our permanent launches this year was frankincense squared. And we call it frankincense squared because it's using two types of frankincense. We have frankincense essential oil, and then we have frankincense resin.

And this is an oversimplification of the process of explaining it, but you basically combine the two. So you take the resin and you put it in the oil, and that oil is acting as the thing that is pulling additional compounds out of the resin. And one of the main ones we were looking at were boswellic acids.

Boswellic acids don't come through very well in steam distillation, if at all, and so they're often left behind in the spent resin. And by doing... We actually use the oil to pull those boswellic acids out of the resin.

So then what you end up with is kind of this supercharged essential oil that has all the benefits of the oil itself, plus those additional compounds that we've brought over into it. And then you remove at the end whatever plant material is left over, filter it, and you kind of have this supercharged oil. So that's what it is.

We change the oil. We change the plant material that we're working with. We're done. We're doing lots of more research and experimentation on different combinations, but that's kind of a simple explanation of what the technology is. Yeah.

And when it comes to that extraction, you're talking about combining two different things to get one amazing thing. That extraction method, what is that exactly? Is that a boil? Is that a press?

Is that a... Yeah, good question. It's really some... Well, I think it's a good question.

There's two aspects to it. One is what kind of properties does that oil have and what kind of properties does the plant material have where the oil will actually act as a good compound for drying out those other beneficial compounds in the plant material. So understanding what the oil does, like how it works in those kind of chemical applications is beneficial. And then the other part is there can be energy added to that process.

So that energy could be something as simple as just agitating it, stirring it, which allows for more access and more of that plant material breakdown. There can be some sonication there where that's something we've played with is sonication, which actually helps break down the cell walls even more so things can be extracted even better. We can look at, like, this is what's so cool about Deep Spectra is there's so many.

ways, there's so many, like, I guess, factors to play with with it, from the species of oil, the species of plant to the energy source that you're adding to that combination to help bring out the best. And it could be a little bit of warmth, you know, steam is relatively warm. So if you keep it that temperature, you know, below the level of, you know, where the steam has been, you're not going to get probably any degradation of that. But that's something that we would look at.

Um, and there are, and you could look at even adding pressure to it. That's not something we've done yet, but these are all just ideas that we're kicking around to see, okay, what, what's going to work best in this process to get the best results out of it. We're always tinkering.

Yeah. So another question I have then, because when it comes to like our standard steam distillation, the way that we extract the oil is through a separator because the oil either has a lower density or higher density than water. So it sits above or below the water. So how does that extraction process go since you're combining these and then extracting what you've created essentially out of that? Yeah.

So in steam distillation, you can think of steam as like the solvent almost that's pulling the essential oil out of the plant material. And when you're separating them, you're taking the oil out. So you're kind of you're removing the solvent, that water that acted as the solvent in a steam form.

is being removed from what you wanted to extract. And, you know, there are, like, solvents that are used a lot in extraction that we don't do here at Young Living. So the ethanol is often used as a solvent.

And in that process, they add the plant material to the solvent. And then when it's extracted what they want from it, they evaporate that ethanol off or that solvent off. So there's often this process of removing what you used as the extraction liquid. But that's what's unique about Deep Spectra, is that we don't remove that extraction liquid because that extraction liquid itself is beneficial.

And so the only thing that's being taken out of it is if there's plant material left over at the end of the process, then we pull that out and we filter it, and you have those other compounds from the plant that are now basically suspended in a solution with that beneficial essential oil. And it's awesome that you talk about that because in a way we're trying to find how we can use 100% of the plant, right? Yeah.

I don't know what the exact number is or percentages per se, but I know, you know, what's so amazing about this is it's completely opposite from how the pharmaceutical world goes about collecting, you know, isotopes or compounds and then, you know, creating a pharmaceutical drug out of it. Yeah. And I'd kind of love you to, if you could dive into that on what makes this so...

different than what you would find in like your typical store-bought drug. Okay. Yeah. So it's interesting.

I actually read an article probably six months ago about some research that they were doing at a university. on a Boswellia extract. And Boswellia is the family or the genus of frankincense.

And so they had done this extract, and they actually did a clinical trial with this extract, and they had found it to be effective. And the clinical trial itself was interesting, but for this discussion, what I found most interesting is they talked about what their next steps were. And so they saw this encouraging result.

And their next step was that they wanted to isolate what in that, like the specific thing in that extract that was having the impact that they were seeing. And once they isolated that, they would do further tests on that. And then if it continued to be effective, they could maybe move it into the next phase, which would be to synthesize it. And then when they've synthesized it, they can patent it and it can be turned into like a medicine.

One of the things that was fascinating about that was that they said they were having a hard time isolating which one was having the effect, which reminds me of a topic in the herbal world, which is botanical synergy. So you know essential oils, other herbal extracts, are mixtures of hundreds of compounds. And so when you have hundreds of compounds, you have them working in multiple pathways, right? So it's not just one compound, one receptor site that it's impacting. You have all of these different ones.

And a really cool thing that can happen in that is this phrase called botanical synergy. And what botanical synergy is, is let's say you have compound A and compound B, right? This one does something.

This one does something. If you add them together. you might expect them to just kind of do those two things, but together.

Sometimes when you add them together, they do even more than they do as you look at the two of them separately. And so it's when you get more than that additive effect is what's called a synergistic effect. And that's why I think this process and this deep spectra process is so exciting because it's like, well, people can say, well, it sounds like a cool process, but what does that mean for me?

Well, instead of trying to isolate down and get to a single molecule, we actually, with Deep Spectra, are taking things and adding more to it. So we're adding even more. And the coolest result that I've seen so far is a test that HK did.

This is just an in vitro test, which means that it was done in a Petri dish. So it's not a clinical trial or anything, but it was a really cool, encouraging result, which was that he compared the antioxidant. activity of frankincense essential oil to the frankincense squared.

And what he found was that the frankincense squared showed a 4.6 times higher antioxidant activity in the petri dish than frankincense essential oil alone. So to me, that is an encouraging and promising result that points towards a botanically synergistic impact that we're getting with deep spectra technology, which I think is really, really exciting. That is amazing to hear.

And I actually haven't heard that number before. I had heard HK was talking about that there was a significant improvement and enhancement over that, but I didn't know it was to that extent, which is just fascinating to see. And we're still in the early years of development, studying, evaluation, all of that with deep spectra. So there's a lot more to come from it.

And there's so much more that we need to explore, like you said, the combinations. I mean, we've only really looked into it, you know, five oils deep, essentially. Yeah. And we have 500 or something like that.

That's right. And so, you know, there's so much to be done and so much that can be done, which is amazing. And one thing that we haven't really talked about is this extraction method is us. No one else can do it.

We have patents for it, which is also phenomenal. No one else can claim this technology. We thought of it first, we did it first, we have it, and we're the only ones to have it as well.

And we talk about innovation on this podcast so much, how my dad and HK and many others were so far ahead of their time. Well, you should stop by my office sometime and see all of the, and maybe you have them too, but, you know, HK running down the hallway to my office with a little amber bottle labeled of Deep Specter, I probably have. I don't know, 20 or 30 bottles of just different things that he's been playing around with.

He's having a lot of fun in there. Yeah, he is. So what are the next steps for Deep Spectra then?

What are we hoping to do within the next few years? What are we hoping to discover? What's kind of the base plan that we have?

Yeah. So what I think our customers are going to see with this is what we did at convention this year, we launched a standalone, I'm calling it a standalone deep spectra extract, right? That's like what you see in a typical five mil bottle, our essential oil bottles, that's the frankincense squared.

So you have the whole extract there in your bottle. Then we also launched phytonutrition here in the US, which is a dietary supplement based round. Black seed oil, which is a fantastic fatty oil from the Najea Sativa plant.

Frankincense Square Deep Spectra Extract. And Orange Cacao Deep Spectra Extract, where we used orange essential oil to extract compounds from the cacao beans. Cacao beans, which, by the way, are grown at our farm in Ecuador. The species native to Ecuador, chosen by your dad specifically to grow there.

So... That is an example of what you'll see more of where we have a nutrition product, but it has deep spectra ingredients inside of it. And then we're looking now at, you know, applications in personal care as well. So I think what people will see is this expansion into all three of these areas and maybe even more product categories. So standalone ones, you could see blends of deep spectra extracts, just like we have blends of essential oils.

You'll see nutrition products that have deep spectra extracts inside of them. And you'll see personal care products that have deep spectra extracts inside of them. And we'll see where we go from there because it's exciting. We don't even know yet all the possibilities that are out there for this.

It's our child, and we're watching it grow up throughout the years. I'm going to be most fascinated with the blends personally. The little time that I had in R&D working with Rex Kidman on blends and learning and understanding of the chemistry and the blend and the dance that the oils do together to kind of coexist with one another inside the blend and then work as a blend just fascinates me. And so I'd be curious to see how something that has more structure to it works with other essential oils because we don't know what that's going to be like. We know what oils play well together and what oils don't.

play well together and what's more difficult to blend with because of all the research and the studying and the trial and error that my dad did. And now it's kind of like, we have to start that all over again, which is exciting to me. I'm super excited for that. It is.

It's exciting. It's fun. It is hard work. But I think one of the things that stands out to me is how this came about really because of our expertise in essential oils, because of our expertise.

in steam distillation and how that process works. I mean, we have 30 years of building our own distilleries, growing our own aromatic plants, understanding the distillation process and what's happening there. I mean, your dad was always tinkering with, you know, the equipment, the shape of, you know, the pipe as it comes out of the distiller, the condenser. And we still do that and make improvements today. But like that 30 years of expertise and then the fact that we have our own labs, right?

We have our R&D lab here. We have the quality lab in Spanish Fork. We have PhD chemists. We have PhD immunologists now with Mark Bartlett, biologists with HK Lin. We are uniquely positioned to do this research and come up with this process in a way that I think no other.

probably no other company in the world is. It's really an outgrowth of that 30 years of experience and expertise that we've developed over those three decades. And it just makes it so exciting. Now, you talked about how HK Lin kind of started all of this inside his lab.

I know we can't get like too in depth, otherwise we'd be here for a long, long time. But if you could kind of explain the general gist of taking a laboratory application and process and making it a consumer application, kind of that transition of, okay, we've done it inside the laboratory. Now, what does it look like going into full production?

You know, taking it from a very small scale to a very large scale. Yeah. Cause I've had people ask, you know, why did it take so long? Why did it take another year to get stuff out to us?

And when you're doing lab scale production, you're doing, you're working with small volumes, right? You might have like a liter. container that you're working in or maybe five liters or something.

But when we're talking about large scale production, we want to move to, you know, it could be a 50 liter extraction drum or something like that. So the equipment that's used in a lab is going to be very different than the equipment that's used in a larger scale production. Even things like filtration, like when you're Filtering, you know, five kilos of something, a process might work at that scale, but when you're filtering 50 kilos of something, that same process doesn't necessarily work.

So luckily we have process engineers. They came up and looked at what HK was doing in his lab, took notes on all that, asked lots of questions, and then they went back to the warehouse and they said, or the manufacturing facility, they said, okay, what equipment do we have that's going to accomplish this same thing? So they get the equipment, they follow the process as much as they can with that equipment, and then they run pilot batches, right?

So the pilot batch is to see, is the equipment working? Is the process working? And then we have to do testing. Because when you're doing something brand new like Deep Spectra, HK did his extractions, and he would have an idea of what we were pulling, say, out of the frankincense resin, but you have to test.

to make sure. So there's a test for, to identify what you're extracting. And then there's tests for quantifying what you're extracting. And they're not always the same test.

And you might have to figure out what test is going to work best for that. And then there's tests like he did that antioxidant test. There's tests for effectiveness. So like, what is this actually doing?

What is this helping? Well, all those tests then need to be duplicated again. when you've done your pilot batch at the larger scale, because you want to make sure that the way you're doing it at a larger scale is providing the same results as what you saw at the lab scale. And then if there's any changes that you need to make to the process, then you have to redo all of that again.

So it's really this kind of iterative process where you try it, you test it, you look at the results, you go and you make some changes, you try it again, you test it again. So it's a long process. It takes a while, but that's the right way to do it to make sure that we're getting the same quality and the quality that we expect from ourselves and that our customers expect from us. Yeah, duplication is not easy, especially when you're increasing the ratio size. It's not necessarily like 4x-ing it or 5x-ing it.

I think a lot of people kind of mistake it as like, oh, well, say I'm making a meal for four people, but I have 12 people coming over. I just, you know. x3 that essentially you know 3x that it's similar to that but in a in a way you know you're also adding a lot more variables into it as well yeah um and like you said you know you you've got to figure out the duplication process how are we able to take what we've had in the lab and then make it a full-blown production and we're creating you know 50x quantity size volume etc and then how do we refine that how we perfect it and how do we make sure that each time we you do this it's perfect right yeah and sometimes it's the smallest things that are the trickiest things right i know with some of the tests that i've done with tyler in the lab for some of our gc testing with the lavender and b research that we've been doing we were off i think on one of these like point zero zero four something like that like just a very very small number yeah but when we went back at our other tests everything lined up so we had to go back and back and back and back and we were there for like two three hours just to make up a point zero zero zero four difference but then we finally got it right yeah and it was the smallest thing and it came down to like a a timing error essentially so we know that at a certain time at a certain peak certain temperature that we expect this compound to come out at this amount and there's a lot of other variables that come into play but i i also think that's kind of the the best thing about us, right, is I know some of our customers and brand partners and myself complain, why does everything take so long to come to market? It's because we want the best. And we're never going to give you something that's half finished.

So I think a lot of people probably have this question, we've kind of explained what is deep spectra, what's so amazing about it. But I think, like deep spectra, where this is a new generation of essential oils, like with a new car. or a new phone that comes out, why would people want to upgrade?

Why would people want to buy? Yeah, that's a great question. And, like, it's not to say there's not a place for frankincense essential oil, right? We love frankincense essential oil.

It is great. One thing that you'd still want to use that for is... diffusing.

Frankincense squared, don't diffuse it. Those heavy molecules, those boswellic acids aren't going to come out in your diffuser. You're just going to be leaving them there in the bottom. So there is a place for both, but why upgrade?

For me, it really comes back to that botanical synergy concept. You have all of these compounds coming together really as nature created them, right? In the ratios that nature created them in that plant, that does something more for you.

We're seeing that in those test results, that 4.6 time increase in the antioxidant activity. This is the benefit. It's nature giving you even more compounds that are going to be even more effective for your health and wellness.

And that's why I'm so excited about this because I think it really is going to do so much more for people. Absolutely. And you won't know unless you try it. That's right. Well, Brad, thank you so much for your time, passion, dedication, everything that you do.

I just know that you and your team and everybody else involved with Deep Spectrum and all the other products that we've got going on. Uh, just do a phenomenal job and everyone is so appreciative with what we've been seeing come out recently. Just super proud of the team and, uh, always love having you come on cause you have, you're just a wealth of information and, uh, you do a great way of kind of sharing it and explaining it with everybody else. So I love being here. Thank you.

Till next time. And thank you for tuning into this episode of the wild drop. Remember you can listen on iTunes, Spotify on YouTube and our website, www.youngliving.com.

Don't forget to oil up young living family. This. This is Jacob Young, dropping out. Take care.

Transcript for:Exploring Young Living's Deep Spectra Technology

Transcript for:
Exploring Young Living's Deep Spectra Technology