Tea for health

Many of the growing up memories of Erlinda Castro Sanqui revolved around her grandmother’s herbal garden in Baloc, Sto. Domingo, Nueva Ecija. "My grandmother would boil leaves from the garden and would make me drink the tea every time I got sick. I didn’t stay sick very long," she said.

Her grandmother, a native doctor or herbolaryo, died in 1984 at the age of 109.

To keep alive the memory of her grandmother, Sanqui concocted an all-natural herbal tea, using the ingredients she remembered from the garden of her childhood. She called it pito-pito tea because she used seven different herbs and leaves.

"I would regularly send the dried herbs to my daughter in the United States with instructions on how to prepare it. She would serve these to her visitors, who all claimed they felt better after drinking the tea," said Sanqui.

Encouraged, Sanqui began putting her tea in sachets, which she sold in supermarkets and drugstores.

"The timing was just right. There was a growing awareness on the nutritional and health values of herbal medicines. This made promoting herbal teas a lot easier," she said.

Sanqui, however, has not been able to fully ride on the increased demand in part because of the huge capital needed for continued research and development and the production of high-quality, all-natural products. Sanqui currently produces and sells her tea under Rita Ritz Bakery Products, which also produces and sells another invention, the Filipino fruitcake made up of locally available fruits, nuts and wines.

Another inhibiting factor is increased competition. Although her invention is patented, it is registered with the Intellectual Property Office as a utility models, which protects the proportion of ingredients used in the making of a product. Sanqui’s pito-pito tea, for example, is different from similarly named teas because of the inclusion of gotu kola or takip kuhol, an anti-oxidant which improves physical and mental health and which has rejuvenating properties.

Through the years, Sanqui has come up with variations of her pito-pito tea, for which she was named the1990 Woman Inventor by the World Property Organization of the UN Development Programme. The tea invention was also awarded the bronze medal at the 25th Salon International des Inventions in Geneva. During that same exhibition in 1997, she also won two silver medals for her banaba tea and for herbal dash, a salt substitute which uses 21 herbs.

In all her tea inventions, Sanqui works closely with the Department of Health and the Department of Science and Technology, both of which are pushing herbal cures in the country. This close collaboration gives her tea lines an unofficial endorsement and an edge over her five competitors.