Three industries are now bidding for the same ashwagandha root, and in April India narrowed what they are allowed to buy.
On April 15, 2026, India’s Ministry of Ayush issued a directive prohibiting ashwagandha leaves in all Ayush drugs and products. The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India followed a day later with a parallel order extending the restriction to food and nutraceutical manufacturers, warning that violations could draw action under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, according to WholeFoods Magazine. Root and root extract are permitted. Leaf and aerial parts are not, in crude form, as an extract, or in any other preparation.
Supplement, beverage and cosmetic buyers have spent five years competing for the same certified organic supply out of a single country. The April orders tighten that supply by taking the cheapest material in the chain off the table.
Supplements still write the biggest checks
The dietary supplement channel industrialized ashwagandha first, and it remains the largest buyer by both volume and value. U.S. herbal supplement sales reached $13.23 billion in 2024, up 5.4 percent over 2023, according to the American Botanical Council’s annual herb market report as covered by SupplySide Supplement Journal. Ashwagandha ranked third in the mainstream channel at $144.5 million, up 13.8 percent, and fifth in the natural channel at $21.2 million, up 6 percent.
The growth rate matters more than the rank. Two of the three herbs ahead of ashwagandha in mainstream retail, psyllium and elderberry, lost ground in 2024, elderberry sharply. Turmeric, the natural channel’s number one herb, slipped in both channels. Ashwagandha is one of very few large botanicals still adding double-digit growth in the channel that moves the most units, which is why extract capacity gets allocated to supplement contracts before anything else.
Beverages moved the volume from capsules to cans
The second demand wave came from drinks. Innova Market Insights places stress relief among the three forces shaping food and beverage innovation for 2026, alongside digestive wellness and protein, and singles out adaptogen drinks as a route for brands chasing stress and focus positioning, per its 2026 beverage trends outlook. Superfood Times traced the capital behind that wave, and the strain it is putting on sourcing, in an earlier report on adaptogen beverages.
Beverage demand changed the specification sheet, not just the tonnage. Crude root powder is earthy, bitter and slow to disperse, so beverage work runs on debittered grades, cold-water dispersible extracts and material that stays clear in solution. Those are separate SKUs with separate lead times, and nearly all of them are built on extract rather than powder. That shifts a growing share of category demand into the extract tier, which is exactly where authenticity risk concentrates.
Cosmetics is the newest bidder
The third buyer arrived most recently and is the least familiar to ingredient suppliers. Ashwagandha now appears on cosmetic ingredient lists under the INCI name Withania Somnifera Root Extract, in serums, moisturizers and hair care positioned around stress, skin barrier and so-called neurocosmetic claims.
Consumer pull is measurable. Boots reported ashwagandha searches up 722 percent year over year in its 2025 trends round-up, the steepest rise of any ingredient the retailer tracked, and noted the herb was moving beyond supplements into skin care, according to Cosmetics Business.
Cosmetic volumes are small next to supplements. The significance is the specification. Formulators buy extract rather than powder, and they buy on solubility, color, odor and preservative compatibility rather than on withanolide percentage. They also buy small lots at high unit prices, which makes them attractive customers for extract houses already stretched by supplement contracts.
One country, one mandi, one problem
Commercial ashwagandha cultivation is concentrated in India, chiefly in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and the reference price for the entire category is set at a handful of trading yards, Neemuch above all.
Arrivals data from Neemuch explains what the April orders were aimed at. In fiscal 2024 to 2025, leaf arrivals reached 4,698 metric tons against 4,171 metric tons of root, according to SupplySide Supplement Journal. Leaf material trades at a small fraction of root prices, by one trade estimate 50 to 100 times lower per kilogram, according to Vitafoods Insights.
More leaf than root moving through the country’s largest ashwagandha market, with no permitted domestic outlet for the leaf, is the arithmetic behind the ban.
Standard testing does not catch it
Leaf substitution persisted because the most common quality test quietly rewards it. Withaferin A and withanone concentrate at roughly six to twenty times higher levels in leaf than in root. A total withanolide assay run on a leaf-cut extract can therefore read as unusually potent rather than as adulterated.
Laboratory work has repeatedly found the problem. HPTLC identity testing of 584 samples found 119, or 20.4 percent, were not authentic root material, with 84 samples, or 14.0 percent, showing leaf. In a separate analysis, eight of ten commercial extracts sold as root carried markers of aerial parts, per Vitafoods Insights.
The Botanical Adulterants Prevention Program published a laboratory guidance document on ashwagandha root in 2025 that assessed 22 analytical methods. Its recommended approach pairs HPTLC fingerprinting with a limit test for flavonol glycosides, compounds present in aerial parts and absent from root, an approach that has carried through into monograph work, per SupplySide Supplement Journal. Any buyer whose incoming specification still says total withanolides and nothing else is not testing for the failure mode that actually occurs.
What organic buyers have to prove separately
Organic status is an independent documentation problem, and the rules for Indian material changed years before most buyers adjusted their paperwork. USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service ended its organic recognition agreement with India’s APEDA in January 2021 and closed the transition window on July 12, 2022. Indian operations selling into the U.S. organic market must be certified directly by a USDA-accredited certifier, per AMS. An NPOP certificate issued by an APEDA-accredited body does not on its own support a USDA organic claim in the United States.
The Strengthening Organic Enforcement rule added a second layer. Organic imports now require an NOP Import Certificate, and far more of the handling chain has to be certified than before. Buyers who rely on a consolidator to gather organic ashwagandha from multiple growers should know exactly which entities in that chain hold certificates and which do not.
Europe is a third rulebook
Anyone shipping finished goods into the European Union works under different constraints again. Denmark banned ashwagandha in food supplements in 2023 after its national food institute concluded that no safe intake level could be established. France’s food safety agency, ANSES, warned in 2024 against use by several population groups, including people with thyroid, liver or heart conditions and pregnant women. In June 2024 a working group of EU food safety agency heads recommended prioritizing ashwagandha for an Article 8 procedure under Regulation (EC) No 1925/2006, the mechanism capable of restricting a substance across all member states, according to Nutrition Insight.
The practical effect for procurement is that a single global specification no longer works. A U.S. beverage brand and an EU supplement brand sourcing from the same Indian extract house need different dossiers, different population warnings and, increasingly, different answers about plant part.
What to put in the next contract
Three-way demand is not going to ease, and the supply base has just been narrowed by regulation. The buyers who come through the next cycle intact will be the ones whose paperwork already says the following.
The Contract Checklist
- Plant part named explicitly: root only, with leaf and aerial parts excluded by name rather than by implication.
- Identity testing by HPTLC fingerprint plus a flavonol glycoside limit test, not a total withanolide assay on its own.
- For organic material, the name of the USDA-accredited certifier holding the certificate, plus the NOP Import Certificate for the shipment.
- Origin stated to the district, not to the country.
- Format-specific attributes for beverage and cosmetic grades: dispersibility, color, odor and solution clarity, written into the specification rather than agreed by sample.
- Retained samples from every lot and a contractual right to retest at an independent laboratory.
Spot buying was already the riskiest way to source this root. With leaf material now barred from India’s own supplement and food channels, the volume that used to disappear quietly into extract blends has to go somewhere else. Forward contracts with growers and extract houses that can answer the plant-part question in writing are the defensible position. Everything else is a bet on a test that was never designed to catch the problem.