Before Torbangun Supplements Were Everywhere: Elk Haven Herbals in 2013

Here’s a fun one. I found this old email recently from April 25, 2013 and it made me laugh.

At the time, Boob Food had only been around for about a year. Torbangun was still a pretty obscure plant in the US, and apparently finding some was not particularly easy.

This woman had just had her second baby and was researching galactagogues because she'd had trouble with milk supply with her first. She came across some of the research on torbangun and decided she wanted to try it.

So she started searching for it.

Eventually she found Elk Haven Herbals, but then lost the website. So she searched for "torbangun elk haven" and found us again.

Here’s my email to her:

And here’s her response:

"Your shop and Etsy are the only places at least in North America that I can find this stuff..."

Fun fact. Not only was that our shop but that was our Etsy store too lol.

It's funny to look back at this email now. At the time I didn't think much of it. But it's a pretty good snapshot of what it was like when torbangun was still almost a black market herb.

I was just trying to figure out how to help new moms. A few years later, other companies were trying to figure out how to sell torbangun. Those are two pretty different ways to end up with the same product. I guess that's the difference between making something because you think it should exist and coming along later after someone else has shown you that there's a market for it.

-Aaron