Irwan Hidayat, Wahyu Widayani, Tsabit Azinar Ahmad, Eka Yudha Wibowo, Nanda Julian Utama
Indonesia's exceptional biocultural richness has long sustained jamu, a plant-based healing tradition that blends empirical practice with cosmological notions of bodily balance, yet in the twentieth century jamu businesses shifted from household decoctions and itinerant vendors into branded, standardized consumer health products; this article traces that transformation through a historical case study of Tolak Angin (Sido Muncul), arguing that the transition was propelled by commodification of family recipes in the early 1900s, state recognition and regulation that framed jamu as "Indonesia's original medicine" during the post-independence decades, and late-twentieth-century modernization in technology and marketing that introduced ready-to-drink sachets, GMP/CPOTB compliance, and clinical evidence supporting OHT status while repositioning jamu as hygienic, practical, and urban-friendly; using qualitative historical reconstruction from archival and printed sources with rigorous source criticism and chronological-thematic narration, the study shows how industrialization preserved and re-signified jamu into a hybrid good—simultaneously heritage and modern therapy—delivering market expansion without severing cultural meaning; the findings imply that policy can strategically couple standards, R&D, biodiversity stewardship, and cultural branding to grow domestic and export markets and to uplift producer communities; the article's novelty lies in its historically grounded synthesis linking technological standardization, state policy, and cultural consumption to explain how a legacy remedy operationalizes Indonesia's health-heritage economy. © 2025, Universitas Negeri Semarang. All rights reserved.
PT Industri Jamu Dan Varması Sido Muncul Tbk, Indonesia; Universitas Negeri Semarang, Indonesia; The University of Queensland, Canada
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