Your body is a temple of God,
let your food be your medicine.

The first half of the slogan comes from the New Testament — a letter written by the Apostle Paul to the Christian community in Corinth, a busy Greek port and Roman colony, somewhere between 53 and 57 AD. Paul wrote it from Ephesus, across the Aegean Sea.

Corinth was a wealthy trading city with a casual attitude to the body — its citizens treated themselves as their own property, free to do with their flesh as they pleased. Paul pushed back with a single image: the human body is a naos, a temple — the inner sanctuary where the divine presence dwells. Not a vessel to be used and discarded. A sacred place to be honoured.

Two thousand years later, that image still cuts through. What you put into the temple is not a casual choice. It either honours the place it’s entering, or it doesn’t. That’s the standard we hold our products to.

The second half of the slogan is usually credited to Hippocrates— the Greek physician (c. 460–370 BC) remembered as the father of medicine. The full line, in its traditional form, is “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food.”

Those exact words don’t appear in his surviving writings — but what he didteach was, in spirit, very close. The right food, in the right amount, at the right time, was medicine. The wrong food was illness waiting to happen. Two and a half thousand years later, that’s still the principle we work to.

Put the two halves next to each other and a company writes itself:

• Temple — from Paul. The body is sacred. It deserves to be treated like the sanctuary it is.
• Foods — from Hippocrates. What you eat is what either heals you or hurts you, slowly, over a lifetime.

Temple Foods: food worthy of the temple. Supplements that earn their place inside a body you intend to respect. That’s the brief. Every product we make is judged against it.

The slogan isn’t marketing. It’s the rule we work to.

Temple Foods began with Dr Anna Jooste — Ph.D. in Natural Medicine, Master Herbalist, and originally a B.Sc. Computer Science graduate from the University of Pretoria. After a serious personal health crisis exposed the limits of conventional treatment, she went looking for the clean supplements her own recovery needed.

We had been living in the United States, where that quality of product was easy to come by. We came home to South Africa in 2009 expecting to find the local equivalent — and there wasn’t one. Capsules here came stuffed with binders, fillers, magnesium stearate, microcrystalline cellulose, silicon dioxide. The good ingredient was buried under the cheap ones.

So we built it ourselves. Anna formulated, Jonathan ran the practitioner side, and the rule was that every product had to pass the temple test: would you put this into a body you intended to honour? If yes, it went on the label. If not, it was out.

The vision is straightforward. We want Temple Foods and our premium sister range, Living Labs, to be the South African brand customers reach for when they refuse to compromise on what goes into the bottle.

That means more clean formulations, made locally on our pharmaceutical-grade line in Pretoria — machine-filled, sealed and bottled for batch-to-batch consistency. More practitioner-backed combinations like our Ashwagandha + B5 blend, where the second ingredient exists because the science demands it — not because a copywriter wanted a longer label. More direct relationships with the customers who actually care.

Quality, then profit. That’s the order. The business runs because the product is good — not the other way around.