For Kheyla Anderson, creating herbal teas to support pregnancy and postpartum was born from her own experience breastfeeding. Leaning into Jamaican ancestral rituals, she harnessed herbs like moringa and sorrel to reinvigorate, re-centre and re-empower new mums when they need it most. But there’s a wider vision: from Prenatal Support teas to podcasts, motherhood ‘check-ins’ to meditation, Kheyla is working to show women the agency they have over their own health and wellbeing. And sometimes it just starts with a cup of tea.

What is Mother Nature’s Recipes?

Mother Nature’s Recipes is a female health brand. We aim to create space for women to listen to their bodies and empower their own wellbeing. We create handcrafted herbal teas designed to support the perinatal experience from pregnancy to postpartum, helping women to find connection in every cup.

What was the inspiration behind the brand?

Mother Nature’s Recipes was born out of the challenges I experienced with breastfeeding following the birth of my first child. Through concerted research efforts, I was able to find holistic measures that I could’ve utilised to support my son and I during such a vulnerable time.

Following my experience, I wanted to simplify access to accurate resources and services that focused on healing from a holistic point of view, and the ability to explore ways we could deepen our connection to ancestral practices and ritual within motherhood, with the aim of empowering women and in turn, impacting maternal health outcomes.

“We create handcrafted herbal teas designed to support the perinatal experience”

What do each of your tea blends do? How do you recommend mothers drink them?

Each blend is designed to support a different stage of the perinatal experience. Prenatal Support is for use from the second trimester and focuses on supporting morning sickness, nourishing the reproductive system and promoting relaxation as the pregnancy progresses.

Milk Aid focuses on supporting breastfeeding by including herbs that have been recognised as galactagogues throughout history [substances that promote the production of breast milk] across various cultures, such as fennel and moringa, pairing them with relaxants to cultivate the calming environment needed to influence milk production.

Tummy Ease contains a range of carminative herbs designed to soothe upset tummies in both babies and adults, whilst Postnatal Boost is an earthy blend full of iron-rich herbs that aim to fight postpartum fatigue and support the uterus after giving birth.

Our blends are curated to support the conscious act of embedding self-care into day-to-day life with ease; to create space for birthing bodies to prioritise themselves, even if momentarily, and sit in the realisation that their wellbeing is not optional, but intrinsically linked to their babies, and that they can lean into nurturing their bodies from the inside out with every cup.

What was your initial research and formulation process like?

When I began formulating recipes for the perinatal range, I undertook a Herbalism course to acquire a basic knowledge of herbs, their properties, and considerations for combining them. I also participated in a Herbal Tea Masterclass with the incredible Joyce Maina, founder of the Cambridge Tea Consultancy, around herbal infusions, sourcing of ingredients and how to build profiles within a tea or tisane blend from flavour and aroma through to texture.

These experiences enabled me to understand not only the types of herbs I wanted to include based upon their benefits, but also how teas are experienced by consumers, and that I had to cultivate an experience.

I began using the ‘botanicals on hold’ list [a list of food products that have had botanical health claims made about them, pending regulatory approval] to research herbs that held specific properties to support the four key stages we explore within our blends (pregnancy, nursing, colic and indigestion, and postpartum); such as the use of ginger for morning sickness in our prenatal blend, or herbal galactagogues to support milk supply, to carminative herbs to ease upset tummies, and antioxidant and iron-rich herbs that aid postpartum fatigue. 

What role does your heritage and identity play in Mother Nature’s Recipes?

It was important to me to incorporate elements of my Jamaican heritage within the blends, especially as a brand whose foundations speak to leaning into lost traditions and rituals to reclaim our ancestral power.

Weaving in herbs like moringa, that have been used by women throughout Jamaican history to build milk supply and iron, to hibiscus, an antioxidant powerhouse known to me as sorrel, a rich herb of many names from bissap, zobo and sobolo across West African culture, these considerations were made to not only make the products functional, but to connect birthing bodies across all of our brand pillars from community to self-care and womanhood.

Once I’d secured the herbs that contained the properties to support the body throughout the perinatal experience, I began looking at the types of herbs that would provide balance to the flavour profile within each blend as a whole. I sourced organic and sustainable versions of each herb, tasted and blended them myself to formulate the recipes, before involving a Medical Herbalist to assess the safety of each blend by identifying any contraindications and how they have been used historically.

How do you want your tea to make mothers feel?

I want our teas to create the space needed for mothers to attempt to connect to the inner workings of their own bodies; to feel nurtured as they sip on a drink designed solely with them in mind. But most of all, I want our teas to help mothers to feel empowered, to prioritise their own wellbeing without it becoming an additional thing to add to the mental load, but instead, to view it as a small act of resistance and a nod to themselves that can all start with just one cup!

What’s a milestone you’d like to reach with Mother Nature’s Recipes?

I’m really starting to formulate ideas around how we collaborate to build community, resources and educate. I want to move towards the co-production of events with existing charitable organisations doing incredible things in the realm of supporting women’s health, such as The Melanin Menstrual Health Community and the Menstrual Health Project; to research what safety for young women actually looks like and co-create spaces like this with them, [and] to cultivate conversations around body autonomy, informed choice and the politicising of women’s bodies and defining what resistance looks like. 

“I want our teas to create the space needed for mothers to attempt to connect to the inner workings of their own bodies”

Beyond the tea, in what ways do you engage and connect with your community?

We have hosted our Sip and Sound events, which pair herbal tea-making workshops with sound baths, meditation to encourage the mind, body, spirit connection and a rebalancing of the nervous system to promote rest and regulation.

We also host a monthly community check-in on Instagram Live, where we hold an informal space where anyone can drop in throughout the 30 minutes and have a chat about absolutely anything. Whether it’s by adding questions in the chat, occupying the space amongst peers or actually joining the Live, people are able to come as they are and just decompress from their day on their own terms.

Lastly, we have the Holistic Health Series, a podcast where I interview holistic practitioners providing services within the maternal space in a bid to create more visibility to cultural practices to support our community in making informed choices around alternative therapies and their wellbeing.

As a business owner, what keeps you going when things get tough?

Hearing from customers who have been supported by our teas or resources in a personal way.  Mother Nature’s Recipes blossomed out of my own lived experience, so in every sale there is the very real hope that our teas will impact mums’ lives and enable them to feel stronger throughout the perinatal experience.

As an entrepreneur, progress isn’t linear, and creating something from a personal space can have such an emotional effect on how you perceive success, so when what you’ve created is having the effect you’ve dreamed of, it’s a strong motivator because you are met with the understanding that your products are effecting change both mentally and physically in support of our holistic approach to wellbeing. 

What’s been your proudest moment?

Receiving an international order from a lovely mum (and a friend of a repeat customer of mine) who was pregnant with her third child. She’d previously experienced a lot of challenges breastfeeding her first two children, which meant she wasn’t able to produce enough milk to do so long-term, which she was devastated by.

She was incredibly anxious about having the same experience with her third child, especially as she had tried various lactation inducing products before, and so she contacted me about the possibility of shipping Mama’s Milk Aid to her country, and began drinking our breastfeeding blend for weeks prior to giving birth.

After giving birth, she got in touch to share that she had been able to produce ample amounts of breastmilk for her baby, and even sent me photos of the milk she was able to pump and store in the freezer! At that moment in time, I was at a real low point with the business, contemplating whether or not  to continue, and honestly, it meant everything to know that a product that was born out of a relatively similar experience, had helped to change the trajectory of not only her breastfeeding experience, but had boosted her confidence as a new mother of three also!

This will always act as a poignant moment of reflection for our brand, because it reaffirms our purpose on a journey that holds so much uncertainty and reminds us of why it’s all worth it.

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