Nin Jiom Pei Pa Kao was flying off the shelves in New York store during the flu season, according to a report by Wall Street.

The Wall Street Journal said, Mr. Alex Schweder, an architect and professor of design at Pratt Institute suffering a cough for about 10 days, felt better 15 minutes after he drank Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa.  It had been recommended by his girlfriend, who first learnt about the herbal supplement 30 years ago when she was living in Hong Kong.

*****************************************************************************

If there’s one thing New Yorkers love more than discovering a new secret remedy, it’s telling other New Yorkers about it.

 

“I’d been super sick for a week and half and couldn’t stop coughing,” said Alex Schweder, an architect and professor of design at Pratt Institute.

 

That’s when his girlfriend gave him a bottle of Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa, an “herbal dietary supplement with honey and loquat,” according to the label.

 

“This started working in 15 minutes,” said Mr. Schweder. “I’ve probably gotten about five people to try it, but I’ve told many more.”

 

Mr. Schweder’s girlfriend, Oberon Sinclair, owner of a creative agency, first learned about the herbal supplement nearly 30 years ago when she was living in Hong Kong.

 

The remedy, often referred to simply as Pei Pa Koa, is sold both in cough-drop form and more commonly in 10-ounce bottles in Chinese markets and Chinese pharmacies for approximately $7 as well as online through third parties for up to $70.

 

Herbal remedies with loquat have been produced in China for hundreds of years.  The Nin Jiom Medicine Manufactory began producing Nin Jiom Pei Pa Kao in Hong Kong In 1946.  The Chinese characters on the bottle translate to “Beijing, in memory of my mother loquat thick paste.”  The company began marketing it to mainland China, North America, and Europe in the 1980s.  Competing loquat syrup remedies are still produced in Hong Kong, but they remain less popular.

 

“All of a sudden, everybody is talking about it,” said Ching Weh Chen, owner of Pearl River, a Chinese market in New York City where the syrup is sold for $7.80.  “Chinese people have known about it for a long, long time.  It goes back to Qing dynasty, but now it’s Caucasian customers coming in and asking for it.”

 

“I got a bottle of it in the height of my flu which seemed to hang about this year for two months deep in my chest and not let go,” said Matthew Modine, the actor currently starring in Netflix’s Stranger Things.”  Mr. Modine bought the product on Amazon and paid about $30.”

 

“My only trepidation was that it was coming from a country with different standards,” said Mr. Modine, who was familiar with loquat from his childhood in Los Angeles.  “They’d fall off a tree and we’d pick them up and throw them at cars.”

 

*****************************************************************************

Source: Wall Street Journal