Young Living Production Methods: How a Truly Great Oil is Made

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More than just a commercial concern.

At Young Living, the first concern is not the commercial aspects of marketing essential oils, but people.  Gary Young is, after all, a healer. 

After proving the potential of essential oils in his clinical practice, and seeing the supply of quality oils diminishing world-wide, he founded Young Living, not as a means to wealth, but to produce quality oils on a large scale and educate people on their proper use. 

From its beginning, rather than defining the bottom line in purely monetary terms, ultimately sacrificing everything to that, Young Living has made it its mission to produce the finest quality oils, containing the most active, and widest array of therapeutic constituents possible, regardless of cost.

The Young Living Farms: Where it all begins

In order to bring you only the best quality essential oils, Young Living strives to control every phase of its organic herb production.  And, while they have some agreements with third-party producers around the world, Young Living, from its inception, has chosen to do the bulk of the farming itself.

To that end, Young Living cultivates 1,700 acres of farm land in Idaho and Utah.  It also has farms in France and Egypt.  Recently Young Living also started a new 1,000-acre farm in Equador, at which they have already distilled 23 new oils, and where they have thousands of live Palo Santo trees, from which they are producing the frankincense of the Andies — a truly amazing and unique oil.  Gary Young is also looking at land in Peru and southern Colombia on which to establish other farms.

On these farms, the species of herbs grown is carefully selected, making sure that only those cultivars that produce the highest quality essential oil are used.  For example, the lavender grown on the Young Living farms is an authentic Lavandula angustifolia, which yields an oil low in camphor and rich in lavendulol and lavendulol acetate (the constituents believed to be the key to lavender's therapeutic action).

Plants are grown on virgin land, uncontaminated by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides or herbicides, and away from pollution sources such as nuclear plants, factories, interstates, highways or heavily populated cities.  An advanced mix of enzymes, trace minerals and organic bio-solids are used to build and maintain the soil, since plants lacking in certain minerals and nutrients yield oils low in therapeutic value.

And, land and crops are watered with mountain stream water, which is the best possible, because of its purity and high mineral content.  (Municipality treated water, or secondary runoff water from residential and commercial areas, can introduce undesirable chemicals and residues into the plant and its essential oil.)

Distilling the oils: In the traditional way, to preserve the quality of the oil

Because Young Living's distillation process takes place right on the farm where the herbs are grown, the herbs are distilled fresh.  This is critical to the production of highest-quality oils, because the essential oils in the plants are very volatile, and any delay in distilling them means that precious oils are lost to evaporation.  Before harvesting, highly skilled managers monitor the percentage of the plant in bloom, the time of day for cutting, the amount of glucose (or bric in the plant) and many other factors critical to top quality therapeutic-grade oil production.

Despite the cost, compared to the practices of commercial distillers, Young Living takes extraordinary pains to preserve all of the fragile aromatic constituents of its essential oils during the distillation process:

→ Plants are steam-distilled, in small batches for extended periods, using low pressure and low heat; the traditional method of distillation, used for centuries in Europe.  (The special low-pressure, low-heat vertical steam technology used by Young Living was developed and patented by Gary Young.)

→ No solvents or synthetic chemicals of any kind are used or added in the distillation process.

→ The cookers are constructed from costly, food-grade, stainless-steel alloys.  The reason for this is that copper or lower-grade steel are more reactive metals and can react with the oils, chemically altering them and harming their therapeutic properties.

Independent analysis of the oils to assure you of top quality

After production, each batch of the essential oils is analyzed at an independent laboratory to assure that it is of the highest quality.

To my knowledge, Young Living is the only essential oil producer in North America that has been collaborating with government certified analytical chemists in Europe to insure that its essential oils meet the highest standards.

To date, Young Living's gas chromatograph is the only machine in the United States to be calibrated according to the European standards.  (In the United States, few companies use the proper analytical equipment and methods to properly analyze essential oils.  Most labs use equipment best suited for synthetic chemicals — not for essential oil analysis.)

Third-party oils: Scrutinized for quality

Most of the essential oils that Young Living doesn't produce itself are imported directly from the distillers.  Gary Young, and a trained team of buyers, travel throughout the world several times a year, to personally inspect the growing conditions and distilling operations of outside essential oil producers, to guarantee that the oils Young Living purchases are of the highest and purest therapeutic-grade possible.

As an added safeguard for you, before these essential oils are purchased, samples are sent to one or more independent laboratories for testing, to insure that they present the chemical profile of truly therapeutic-grade essential oils.

No cutting corners to make oils more cheaply

Producing pure, therapeutic-grade essential oils is very costly.  The methods required are time- and labor-intensive, and it often requires several hundred — or even thousands — of pounds of raw plant material to produce a single pound of essential oil.  For example,

• it takes three tons of melissa to produce one pound of oil.  Its extremely low yield explains why it sells for $9000 to $15,000 per kilo.
• It takes 5000 pounds of rose petals to produce one pound of rose oil.

It's not hard to find cheaper essential oils, but you would have to travel the world over to find any that are even close to the quality of Young Living Essential Oils.