About Us

Our Story

by Anthony VERDUGO Founder, CEO & Agronomist

I created Aroha Sourcing in 2017 following multiple trips and human encounters that convinced me that our added value is based on our daily presence in the field with my team. I am an agricultural engineer specialized in botanical sectors and I am lucky to have a team of engineers with whom we complement well each other.

The Founder Letter

Aroha is a human and entrepreneurial adventure, started in New Zealand. Aroha means “Love, passion” in Maori, but for me in particular it means an encounter with this country in 2009, country for which I felt a great deal of affection meeting great hearted people with whom we shared beautiful life moments, beautiful expeditions… I also discovered the kiwi fruit sector there, a nice way to enter into the plant world…

Since my return from New-Zealand, I knew that plants would be the common thread of my future adventures as a professional and that travels will become my everyday life to get as close as possible to nature’s plenty beauties.

From Namibia to Cameroun, Burkina Faso to Madagascar, going through Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos (the list is not exhaustive), I have crossed sometimes hostile lands, but the encounters have always been magical. The encounter with the Namibian Bushmen to collect a secondary root at the border between Angola and Namibia has been a great lesson of humility and sharing ; the hibiscus harvest in Burkina Faso with Madam Tamini, this African treasure that I had the honor to meet in 2013, a beautiful lesson of life ; collect Tongkat Ali roots in the Malaysian jungle with my friend Che was a wonderful opportunity to discover this beautiful country… Than there will be these two years, roaming South East Asia, which will led us to Vietnam. We will stop there in 2017 to discover the wealth of this country and position ourselves between Asia and Oceania. This strategic position allow us to easily explore new lands and bring back treasures from the plant world as nature does them so well.

Adventure continues and Aroha’s story will continue writing itself over the encounter of passionate people, as it is a story of men and women that we are writing and living…

Join us to live it together!
Optimistically yours,

Anthony VERDUGO
Founder – CEO Aroha

OurTeam

To feed a changing world it takes an incredible team. Every Aroha’s team member plays an important role in our success.

We are a team of 5 passionate agronomists based in Vietnam and Turkey sourcing the best quality products to offer to our customers.

Culture and values

Aroha's commitments

We are passionate, bold and driven. We based our work on sharing, respect and durability belong all the supply chain actors we are working with.
We are focus on the traceability, quality and ‘’locality’’ to destination of food business, nutraceutical and cosmetic.

Citations and Inspirations

‘’It inspires me from the first glance, from the first handshake, a deep feeling of confidence, security, friendship. It belongs to this strong race of men, soldiers of fortune, explorers by vocation, professional hunters, in difficult and dangerous climates, big game, images or news, people for whom the adventure is the daily bread, the courage an habit, the modesty a law, who seek the risk and even provoke it, create it, without knowing it, and who are rich only in lived and beautiful stories, which they will never write because they seem simple.’’

"Whatever you dream of doing, start it. Boldness gives genius, power and magic. Start now."

“The difference between the possible and the impossible lies in a man’s determination.”

Quality and food safety

We are dedicated to protecting the health of consumers by supplying safe and high-quality products to our customers.

Concretely, we are doing:

Audits and follow-ups of our partner farms. We visit plantations and farmers with a follow-up of the crop book in pre and post harvest to ensure that our products are grown according to the specifications of conventional or organic farming according to our products (every detail is recorded and each step must comply with the standard).
Audit of partner factories at least twice a year, based on the GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices) standard.
A quality control is carried out and we do a representative sampling for each batch before each shipment (according to a defined methodology). These samples are sent to an analysis laboratory completing international standards to ensure the compliance of our batches. In particular, we do pesticide and microbiological analyses and we keep them for 3 months in a sample library.

This approach forms the basis for the creation and monitoring of our Supply Chain.