Red Ginger with Great Benefits

Reporting from LINE Today, PT Kalbe Farma Tbk introduced Negeri Jahe Merah which was designed by BU BINA (Bintang Toedjoe Innovation Natural Business Unit).

BU BINA is a B2B division of Bintang Toedjoe that focuses on natural raw materials, to support the sustainability and availability of the best red ginger.

"Bintang Toedjoe has produced herbal products since 2000. But the journey has not been able to get standardized raw red ginger, making product performance fluctuate," said Head of BU BINA Sari Pramadiyanti in a release received by GenPI.com, Tuesday (24/5/). 2022).

He explained that these obstacles occurred due to weather conditions, such as sometimes being hampered by flooding.

Another reason is due to inconsistent maintenance, for example, sometimes it is diligently fertilized, cleaning pests, or watering, but sometimes it is not.

In 2012, it launched the Bejo product.

However, the same problem arises, namely that sometimes there are ingredients in stock and sometimes they run out, to the quality of ginger which is sometimes spicy and sometimes not spicy.

"This is our focus product, so we see the need to ensure quality inconsistency and supply sustainability. So we try to develop a herbal ecosystem that focuses on our main raw material, namely red ginger," explained Sari.

She also hopes that the herbal ecosystem can support the independence of national raw materials, without depending on foreign countries because there are many critical components that need to be considered, such as travel leadtime, container/handling conditions during the trip, and others.

Sari emphasized that her party decided to develop integration from upstream to downstream.

This is different from the pharmaceutical industry in general, which only focuses on downstream by using raw materials, then producing and selling them.

"Now we are trying to go even earlier. We go upstream, in terms of nurturing farmers to plant red ginger. Starting from seeding, planting, harvesting, post-harvest processing, then selling," she explained.

Red ginger was chosen because it has good health benefits, compared to "emprit" ginger and "gajah" ginger.

In addition, red ginger contains anthocyanins (which cause the red color) as antioxidants and the essential oil content in red ginger is higher.

The level of spiciness and gingerol content of red ginger was higher than that of "gajah" ginger, but not significantly different from that of "emprit" ginger.

"There are seven aspects in the red ginger ecosystem. First, nursery or about seeds. So that the red ginger produced is good, then we choose good seeds, so we work together with BPPT, Balittro, to produce seeds and varieties that are proven to be superior," said Sari .

The red ginger ecosystem also has a tissue culture lab that was built with Kyung Hee University of South Korea and the University of Surabaya, called Kalbe Ubaya Hanbang Bio Lab.

After a good seed is selected, the next stage is cultivation.

At this stage, coaching on how to maintain the plant.

"This means that farmers are given SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) so that the method of watering is correct, the water is neither excess nor shortage. Sometimes our team monitors the location to ensure that farmer partners carry out planting according to the procedure," she said.

After planting, red ginger is maintained until harvest, at least at the age of 10 months.

This is because there are quality parameters that must be achieved, which is gingerol.

The next stage, post-harvest, BU BINA ensures that the red ginger is harvested, washed, chopped, and dried according to certain specification requirements such as the water content should not be more than 10% so that there is no fungus in the harvested red ginger.

As additional information, red ginger from the BINA ecosystem has been tested to be free of aflatoxin.

"Then enter the extraction process to produce extracts, or it can also be used as ginger oil through the distillation process. From there the ginger consumed has health benefits, so there is a pharmacological stage," she added.

Then conduct preclinical and clinical trials to ensure red ginger has health benefits according to claims, and is packaged and can be commercialized.

"Hopefully, it can be exported abroad, so that not only local people know about red ginger, but overseas also know Red Ginger, in accordance with Kalbe's strategic initiative, namely Go Global," she said.

On the other hand, Bejo Jahe Merah is a product of Bintang Toedjoe that uses red ginger from the BINA ecosystem and is being clinically tested as an immunomodulator.

The clinical trial is to see the effectiveness of using Bejo Jahe Merah as a complementary therapy for patients infected with Covid-19 with mild symptoms.