Why dried herbs fail more often than fresh produce
Pesticide limits in the EU are set by Regulation 396/2005, and where no specific limit exists, a default of 0.01 mg/kg applies — close to the limit of detection. Dried herbs carry an extra handicap: drying removes most of the water but not the residues, concentrating whatever was on the fresh leaf several-fold. A spray that would have been unremarkable on fresh mint can put a dried lot comfortably over the limit.
Add compounds that arrive from outside the field — chlorate from chlorinated wash water, residues drifting from a neighbour's cotton — and you see why testing alone is not a strategy. Testing tells you which lots to reject. It doesn't produce lots you can accept.
The controls that actually work
- Contracted, named plots. If you don't know which field a lot came from, no other control is real. We map and contract plots before the season starts, so every downstream record hangs on a named piece of land.
- An approved-inputs list, agreed before sowing. The grower knows from day one which plant-protection products are acceptable for the destination market — and which ones end the contract.
- Spray diaries, kept per plot and per application. Product, dose, date. Boring, and decisive: the diary is what turns a residue result from a mystery into a traceable event.
- Pre-harvest interval (PHI) enforcement. Most MRL failures are not exotic chemistry — they are legal products sprayed too close to picking. The PHI is enforced and recorded, not assumed.
- A field-sample screen before purchase. Before we commit to a plot's harvest, a field sample goes to an ISO/IEC 17025 laboratory — led by Egypt's national QCAP facility — for a multi-residue screen. If the field fails, we never buy it. This is the single control that changes the economics: rejection happens at the farm gate, not at Rotterdam.
What the commercial lot ships with
Every commercial lot then carries its own ISO/IEC 17025 report referencing EU Reg. 396/2005 (GCC and US panels on request), tied to the plots of origin through the QR lot passport — spray diary, PHI record and custody chain included. One scan connects your purchase order to the field.
Three questions for any supplier
- Can you name the plots behind this lot — and show the spray diary?
- Was a residue screen done before you bought from the farmer, or only after?
- Which laboratory ran the panel, and is it ISO/IEC 17025-accredited?
A supplier with real field controls answers all three in one email. We do — usually with the 48-hour audit pack attached.