A rare omega
Sea buckthorn is one of very few plant sources of Omega-7 — palmitoleic acid — a fatty acid researchers have studied as a signalling lipid, alongside the more familiar Omegas 3, 6 and 9.
The Story
The man who made India look twice at a wild orange berry
In the high cold desert of Ladakh, a thorny shrub has been fruiting for centuries at altitudes where almost nothing else survives. Locals ate it, fed it to horses, and thought nothing of it. Arjun Khanna thought a great deal of it.
The family had been working with Himalayan botanicals since 1993, when Biosash was founded by Sh. Ramesh “Nico” Khanna. Sea buckthorn was the plant that changed the company's direction — and Arjun's. From 2005 Biosash began moving the berry out of Ladakh's local markets and onto Indian shelves, and that effort became the work that has defined his career since.
Most of it was the unglamorous half: establishing what the fruit actually contains, understanding how communities in the cold desert had used it for generations, and then solving the much harder problem of getting a wild Himalayan berry into a bottle without destroying what made it worth bottling. Organic certification, lab testing and pre-clinical trials followed.
Somewhere along the way he became the person India calls to explain it — on podcasts, at industry conferences, and at the Seabuckthorn Association of India, of which he is a member. The name stuck: the Sea Buckthorn Guru.
