The Challenge of Developing Red Ginger

According to LINE Today, ginger has long been utilized as a medicinal herb due to its established health advantages. However, it turns out that maintaining the quality of the ginger that is grown in order for it to provide health advantages is difficult.

Sari Pramadiyanti, the Head of BU BINA (Star Toedjoe Innovation Natural Business Unit), mentioned this. She mentioned that they have created a lot of goods.

"However, it turns out that we were unable to get standardized raw materials along the expedition. As a result, the product's performance fluctuated "She stated.

As a result, her party agreed to work on upstream-downstream integration. This is in contrast to the pharmaceutical sector in general, which concentrates solely on the downstream by utilizing raw materials, then producing and selling them.

"All right, let's attempt to leave even sooner. We work upstream to encourage farmers to cultivate red ginger. "It starts with seeding, then planting, harvesting, post-harvest processing, and finally selling," she stated.

Red ginger was chosen because it offers more health advantages than "gajah" ginger and emprit ginger. Red ginger includes anthocyanins (the red pigment) as antioxidants, and its essential oil level is greater. Red ginger had a greater level of spiciness and gingerol concentration than "gajah" ginger, but it was not substantially different from "emprit" ginger.

"Our red ginger ecosystem has seven components. First, consider the nursery or the seeds. So that the red ginger produced is of high quality, we select good seeds, and we collaborate with BPPT, Balittro, to generate superior seeds and kinds "Sari said.

The red ginger ecosystem also contains a tissue culture lab named Kalbe Ubaya Hanbang Bio Lab, which was established in collaboration with Kyung Hee University in South Korea and the University of Surabaya. The cultivation process begins once a nice seed is chosen. At this point, coaching on plant maintenance is provided.

"This implies that farmers are given SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) to ensure that the watering process is right and that the water being irrigated is neither too much nor too little. Sometimes our team monitors the location to ensure that partner farmers carry out planting according to procedures,” she said.

Red ginger is maintained once it has been planted for at least 10 months. This is due to the fact that certain quality requirements must be met, one of which is the gingerol content.

The following stage is post-harvest. BU BINA guarantees that red ginger is harvested, rinsed, chopped, and dried in accordance with precise specifications, such as a water content of no more than 10% to ensure that there is no fungus in the collected red ginger. In addition, red ginger from the BINA environment has been evaluated and shown to be aflatoxin-free.

"We next go through the extraction process to create the extract, or it may be converted into ginger oil through the distillation process. Then, there is a pharmacological stage to ensure that the ginger we ingest has health advantages. We conduct both preclinical and clinical testing to guarantee that red ginger provides the health advantages stated. It is then packaged and commercialized," Sari stated.

"Hopefully, it can be sold worldwide so that not only local people, but also people from other countries, know about red ginger, in accordance with Kalbe's strategic plan, Go Global," she added.

Bintang Toedjoe's partner farmers are now mostly concentrated in Sumatra, Java, and Nusa Tenggara. Sari indicated that monitoring was difficult in the dispersed places.

“There are a lot of things that must be visited to ensure that there are more than 1500 platinum main farmer partners, namely farmers who are experienced and have sent more than once. On the other hand, we are happy because it touches many parts of Indonesia everywhere. Hopefully, with this ecosystem we can embrace many parties and provide benefits to others," she concluded.