Kratom Brand Reviews
Six companies, six stories, and why each one is on our shelf, in six profiles below.
Every brand in this section has a story, and most of them surprised us. A Texas country singer. Two friends with one scale. A sunrise outside a tour bus in Lubbock. A crowned lion in Virginia. A kettle in Japan. And our own house brand, which started with three friends on the phone.
These pages are profiles of the companies behind those names. Each one covers who started the company, where it came from, how it looks after people and why we’re grateful to carry it.
Whole Earth Kratom Review
Our own story. How three friends and one brand on the shelf became Whole Earth Gifts, where our house brand came from and what its AKA qualification means.
KR8OM Review
A North Texas extract brand and a sunrise meeting outside a tour bus in Lubbock. How to say the name, what the early days looked like and how KR8OM stood up for kratom.
1836 Kratom Review
A Texas country singer turned kratom maker. Where the name comes from, why every lot is tested twice and what it takes to become an 1836 Trusted Vendor.
Super Speciosa Review
Two friends, one scale and a stack of shipping labels. The machines they built themselves, the QR code on every bag and how the company ended up in an FDA study.
Zion Herbals Review
A Richmond, Virginia company with a long catalog and a short motto. Who is behind it, what the crowned lion is about and where Zion has stood on kratom’s future.
Blate Papes Review
Not a kratom brand at all. An edible film with roots in a kettle spill in Japan in 1902, and the two founders who brought it to Texas.
Profiles, not product reviews
The addresses say review, because that is the word people search for. The pages are something else. We don’t score products here, and we don’t tell you which one to buy.
Each profile is about the company. We wrote them the way we would introduce a friend: warmly, honestly and with the good stories left in. Where a company left a public record, like a trademark filing, a witness list or a lab report, we went and read it. Where we know the people, we say so. Where we don’t, we say that too.
What the six have in common
More than we expected when we started writing.
Four of the six are Texas companies. Our own is in Arlington. KR8OM makes its products in North Texas, 1836 Kratom is just north of Austin, and Blated, the company behind Blate Papes, is in Austin too. Super Speciosa started in Florida, and Zion Herbals is in Richmond, Virginia.
Several of them have put their names on the public record for kratom. KR8OM and 1836 Kratom were both on a Texas Senate witness list against a bill that would have put kratom in the state’s most serious drug category. Zion’s founder wrote to Virginia’s Board of Pharmacy when a petition asked it to put kratom’s main alkaloids in Schedule I.
Every kratom brand here sends its products to outside labs, and our lab tests page points you to their reports. Two of them, Whole Earth and 1836 Kratom, are AKA GMP Qualified. Kratom Quality and Testing explains how to check any company for yourself.
One of these is not like the others
Blate Papes is not a kratom brand. It is an edible film brand, and it earned its place here on its own story, which runs back to a spill on a hot kettle in Japan in 1902. It also shares a birthday with us. Blated and Whole Earth Gifts both opened in June 2020.
Two of the other companies are best known for extracts. Extracts are concentrated, and we never recommend them to anyone new to kratom. Kratom Extract explains how a concentrated product differs from the leaf.
Where to start
If you want to know who we are, start with Whole Earth Kratom Review. It’s our own story, and every other profile makes a little more sense after it.
If you’re shopping by brand, every product we carry is sorted by company on our kratom brands page.
None of these pages covers how much or how often. Responsible Kratom Use owns those questions and answers them properly.
Back to the Kratom Guide.