A Conversation with Matt Richards
by Ann Armbrecht, SHI Founder and Director
During the 2026 SHI Learning Lab, Matt Richards, Global Supply Manager for Organic Herb Trading Company, joined me to speak about the ways being involved in the Sustainable Herbs Initiative has informed his work. Below are some of the highlights he shared.
- Community SHI offers a place to learn to be in a reciprocal exchange with others. It has been invaluable to share his ideas about what is and isn’t working in the herb industry with others who are grappling with and thinking about the same challenges and issues.
- Learning about systems It has been helpful to see the herb industry as a system and to understand different people’s perspective on that system, what they value, what is challenging, depending on their position.
- Friends. A lot of friendship. As Nate Brennan said on the Nicaragua Learning Journey, “SHI brings built in friends and built in responsibilities.”
- Plants as sentient beings Seeing the ways plants have their own existence, not just to be of use to us.
- Honesty It is so valuable to have honest conversations with everybody about how we deal with the challenges we experience.
- Decolonizing supply chains. Understanding the power dynamics and the history of the trade of plants has been invaluable as has understanding our responsibility to do things differently, especially in things like tea.
- Confidence and courage The community and conversations has helped him have confidence in the things he felt before but maybe didn’t fully trust. And this has also given him the courage to be more honest about how things are in the industry and not just go along with business as usual
- Awareness Changing the words he uses. For example, instead of using the word raw materials, something which refers to plants as dry things in a dusty warehouse, he is now trying to talk about them as plants. This subtle shift has started to change the mentality in their business. Or to speak of partners rather than suppliers.
- Shift from Compliance to Connection There is a compliance culture in sourcing, he said. And so this work with SHI has inspired him to think about how we change that so that the goal is to connect with people as you facilitate the movement of plants. That that connection is the goal, not just saying, “Well done or not so well done,” when you visit companies at the source. He now understands that his role is to facilitate the movement of plants, rather than just extract the value at each step.
