Bioriginal’s Borage Story

Located in the heart of the Canadian Prairies in Saskatchewan, our founders set out to find producers in this region to cultivate borage.  We began to build relationships with borage producers by providing them with high quality borage seeds and assistance on proper growing and harvesting techniques.  After harvest, we would sort the seeds to ensure we only keep the highest quality seeds.  We gave a portion of these seeds to our producers for the upcoming season and used a portion of the seeds to extract borage oil.  We even set aside some seeds for insurance, in case our producers encounter a bad growing season.  We would bring the seeds allocated for oil production to our manufacturing facility to crush, extract and process borage oil.  It was important and still remains important for us to use this closed loop production system to control quality and ensure traceability of each batch of borage oil.  We collaborated with research organizations and universities to discover the wide range of health benefits offered by borage oil and the different techniques to improve growing the borage plant.  This research and discovery has allowed us to influence the GLA industry:

• In 2001, we were the first company to introduce the standard for non-hexane processing for GLA products, a technique that uses no solvents for extraction of oil from the seed.
• In 2005, we were the first company to receive GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) certification from the American Food and Drug Administration for our borage oil.

In 1993, Bioriginal’s story began with borage.  Over the years, we expanded our GLA product portfolio to include evening primrose oil, blackcurrant seed oil, hemp oil and echium oil.  Twenty years later, we continue to strive towards nurturing and growing our relationships with GLA source producers, research organizations and universities.   These relationships allow us to work towards improving yield, processing techniques and oil quality – ultimately enhancing our customer’s experience with Bioriginal’s GLA solutions.