what makes doTERRA different?
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Founded in 2008, doTERRA was built on the mission of sharing therapeutic-grade essential oils with the world. The founding partners had seen for themselves the incredible benefits that can be had from using these precious resources, so this group of health-care and business professionals set out to make this mission a reality. They formed a company and named it doTERRA, a Latin derivative meaning “Gift of the Earth.”
The first hurdle to overcome, however, was to establish a standard of quality in an industry that had never had one. It wasn’t enough to simply provide essential oils to homes around the world; the doTERRA founders were committed to providing only the highest quality and purest essential oils so that families could know with surety that they were using only the best to promote health and wellness for their loved ones.
This commitment lead to the creation of a new standard of therapeutic quality:
WHAT IS CPTG?
The purity of an essential oil is its most important characteristic. An essential oil that isn’t pure means you run the risk of putting germs, heavy metals, or adulterants onto or into your body, which can provoke irritation, adverse effects, or even sickness.
Without an accepted standard for essential oil quality, doTERRA created its own testing process, calling it CPTG Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade.
The CPTG process certifies that there are no added fillers, synthetic ingredients, or harmful contaminants in their essential oils that would reduce their efficacy. doTERRA even goes a step further, putting all their products and the packaging through a battery of tests to ensure a long and effective shelf-life. This protocol ensures potency, purity, and consistency batch to batch.
GROWING MATTERS
Proper methods of growing,
harvesting, and distilling are also crucial to maintaining purity. Poor production practices and the development of synthetic essential oil variations suggest that it is impossible to accurately identify a pure essential oil without scientific analysis. Appropriate analysis of the constituents within an essential oil is one of the most challenging and detailed aspects of quality assurance.
Nurturing plants in the most favorable environment and carefully harvesting and transporting plant material for processing ensures an optimal yield of pure and potent essential oils. Spanning the continents of the globe, doTERRA’s exclusive network of growers and harvesters are experts at cultivating plants specific to the essential oil industry.
TESTING
WHAT TESTS ARE DONE?
The CPTG testing begins immediately after distillation with each oil being reviewed for its chemical composition. A second round of testing is carried out at our production facility to ensure that what was distilled and tested is the same essential oil as was received. A third review of the chemistry of the oil is conducted in a three-phase procedure as the oils are packaged into the bottles we use as consumers. Each of these tests confirms that the essential oil is free of contaminants and unexpected alterations during production.
The CPTG Certified Pure Therapeutic Grade quality protocol includes the following tests:
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Organoleptic testing
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Microbial testing
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Gas chromatography
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Mass spectrometry
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Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy (FTIR)
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Chirality testing
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Isotopic analysis
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Heavy metal testing
Historically, gas chromatography was sufficient to identify individual components in an essential oil. However, as more sophisticated methods for developing synthetic essential oil products formed, further validation methods were needed. Over time, additional testing methods such as mass spectroscopy, chiral analysis, FTIR Scan, carbon isotope analysis and others have been developed to more accurately identify each individual essential oil constituent.
Testing
doTERRA makes all their GCMS quality reports public. At any time you can go to:
and look up the batch number of your essential oil to see exactly what the numbers it tested at are.
CO-IMPACT SOURCING
In addition to supplying the highest quality essential oils doTERRA is committed to making a positive difference in the lives of farmers, harvesters, and distillers who contribute to doTERRA’s oil production.
With over 100 essential oils in its product line, doTERRA sources its oils from over 40 countries —more than half of which could be considered developing countries. To ensure that small scale farmers and harvesters in disadvantaged areas are treated ethically, doTERRA has introduced an initiative called Co-Impact Sourcing.
Co-Impact Sourcing is an initiative that seeks to develop long-term, mutually beneficial supplier partnerships while creating sustainable jobs and providing reliable income in underdeveloped areas. doTERRA is committed to the ethical treatment of its suppliers by providing on-time payments at fair prices. Growers and harvesters are encouraged to form cooperative groups to share collective benefits and bargaining power while improving skills and capacity.
Additionally, the Healing Hands Foundation, doTERRA’s charitable organization, provides funding and resources to create community-based, social-impact projects to improve lives in the larger communities where oils are sourced. Past projects include building or sponsoring existing medical clinics, installing drinking water and irrigation systems, building schools, and providing other educational resources such as vocational training programs.
