CT Community Herbalist and Food Entrepreneur Uses Personal Journey Back to Health to Heal Others

Through homemade herbal recipes, Tynne Love aspires to educate and encourage the use of herbal remedies as a means to heal and protect the health of individuals in and around Connecticut.

The founder of Herbal Deva, a fledgling business based in Westport, creates natural healing remedies to provide customers with a convenient, easy and affordable way to include herbs in their daily diet. Herbal Deva’s remedies aim to help customers sustain a healthier lifestyle and alleviate a variety of common pain symptoms.

Love and her mother had been making elderberry syrup together for their close friends and family since 2000, but Love pursued other career paths in the meantime before transforming the use of herbal remedies into a successful business and full-time career.

Prior to the launch of Herbal Deva, Love traveled back and forth between her bands In New York and California, touring on and off between the ages of 17-24. Upon returning home to West Haven, Love worked as a raw vegan chef at Catch Healthy Habit Café in Fairfield for many years. There, she began experimenting making recipes with herbs and selling them to customers of the café. Love explains her experimental recipes were widely requested by customers, which sparked her idea to start an herbal remedy business of her own.

Love’s passion for restorative herbs and remedies arose from health complications of her own.

Her whole life, Love experienced an unexplainable illness that doctors struggled to diagnose, causing chronic pain, discomfort, and daily struggles to eat, move or work.  

With no definitive explanation from doctors or relief from her constant pain, Love describes feeling angry and exhausted. She experimented with herbs from her mother’s homegrown herbal garden as an attempt to heal and strengthen her body. After beginning to transform her diet and eating more herbs, Love recalls being drawn to the plants surrounding her home as the herbs slowly nursed her back to health and restored her strength.

Inspired by the healing powers that the herbs provided her, Love decided to pursue a career as a clinical herbalist, with the hope of making others aware of the benefits and capability of alternative medicine. She underwent four years of training from herbalist David Winston to become a certified clinical herbalist, which would allow her to use the same techniques she used for herself, to heal others in her community.

Following extensive clinical training, Love launched Herbal Deva in 2017 with a plan to make and sell her locally grown and organically sourced herbal remedies at local public markets and at various online retail locations.

While Love had years of training and experience in creating herbal remedies, she soon realized that in order to maximize the number of community members she could help heal, she needed additional guidance on how to successfully run a business.

Love applied to reSET’s Food Incubator Program to achieve that objective.  The Hartford-based program is designed to support entrepreneurs with a passion for food, culinary skill and a viable food business concept by connecting them with mentors and resources to create and build a sustainable food business. 

The current market for herbal remedies includes toxic ingredients and watered-down products, explains Love. There are relatively few people growing high integrity plants that are healthy, healing and affordable. Love’s intention with Herbal Deva is to provide customers with convenient ways to incorporate herbal syrups into their pre-existing diet, as well as provide an education to customers about the many uses and benefits of an herbal diet.

Herbal Deva offers a variety of herbal remedies including teas, spices, syrups, skin rubs and sprays using herbs harvested from her own urban farm as well as from local farms across Connecticut which are available on her website, Etsy shop and at local farmers markets across Connecticut.

As a means to better educate her customers on the uses and benefits of herbal remedies, Love also offers consolations for customers in order to determine which herbs they should take to treat their individual symptoms. Customers interested in scheduling a personal herbal protocol can do so using this form.

“On my journey back to health using herbal remedies, I realized it was not only about connecting people to plants, but also about connecting plant people with other plant people. My mission with Herbal Deva is to make people ask not only what this plant can do for me, but what can I do for this plant,” says Love.

Customers local to Connecticut can expect to find Herbal Deva at various pop-ups and farmers markets across the state. In the upcoming months Herbal Deva will be at Westport Farmers Market, Fairfield Farmers Market, (Milford) Walnut Beach Farmers Market, (New Haven) Wooster Square Farmers Market, Lachat Farmers Market and Fair Fest 2021 in Thompson, CT selling her teas, syrups, spices, and more. For a full list of dates and shops currently selling Herbal Deva products visit her website, www.herbaldeva.com.

Looking ahead, Love aspires to continue growing Herbal Deva and connecting customers to the healing plants used in her remedies on a deeper level. To achieve this, Love plans to eventually open a café which will offer classes on the harvesting process and culinary uses of herbs to heal, various treatment rooms, operate her own commercial kitchen and provide an outdoor teaching gardens where she would grow her own herbs and take clients to connect with the plants.

She is also looking for more ways to continue educating the community about the healing powers of herbal remedies. She looks to grow her team as the demand for product increases and hopes to add more offices, shops and markets to supply her syrups and teas.

As a participant in reSET’s Food Incubator Program, which collaborates with Hands on Hartford and reSET, Herbal Deva pitched along with 15 other food entrepreneurs at the conclusion of the 12-week program this spring for a chance to win additional funding for their business. This year’s program focused on what it takes to create a strong, agile business that can adapt to the changing times of the COVID era, according to reSET officials. reSET assists more than 205 entrepreneurs each year through a variety of programs, events and mentoring opportunities. You can learn more about reSET and the Food Incubator Program at www.resetco.org.

This article was reported and written by Lauren Malenchini, a CT by the Numbers intern who attends Quinnipiac University. More of her work can be seen at https://malenchinilauren.wixsite.com/my-site