Sustainable People
We work directly with small holder farmers on the island of Java, Indonesia, to produce our Sweet Tree organic coconut sugar. 100% of the money from growing, harvesting and primary processing of this ingredient stays in the local community. These farmers grow a multitude of crops on their land, supporting biodiverse landscapes that enrich the soil, preserving water sources and sustaining the local biome to ensure that trees are maintained and not cut down. This in turn sustains the people of the communities for generations to come.
Sweet Tree also works directly with international NGO’s in order to maintain transparent, socially equitable supply chains. We are directly involved in the development of farmer cooperative programs and the creation of additional “sugar shacks” to ensure quality supply for this growing product. We ensure that these sugar shacks are owned by the cooperatives, keeping more money at the community level.
Our sustainable supply chain manages direct producer programs in value addition education and practice, market access and small business/cooperative management. Through this market access and production training, smallholdersugar-tappers have risen well above the poverty line and are able to earn an increase in personal income of close to 200% while maintaining a competitive market price as a cane sugar alternative!
How can we do all of this? Because our main office is in Bali, Indonesia and we're just a hop, skip and a jump from the farms. We visit the farms frequently, ensuring all is good, everyone is happy and the nectar is flowing.
Being this close to the farms allows us to ensure quality control systems are maintained so we can continue to bring the highest quality coconut palm sugar to the international market.
Reports published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the World Bank show that Coconut Palms and other nectar-producing species of palms* are likely the world’s most sustainable source of sugar.
Why?
- Coconut Palms and other sugar producing tropical palms are nearly twice as productive per hectare as sugarcane and are a far more sustainable source of sweetener because they grow in diverse, wild-life supportive ecosystems as opposed to huge mono-crop plantings.
- Coconut Palms can grow in severely depleted soil (think of a sandy beach!) and use very little water; In fact, not only do they require such little maintenance, but they actually improve soil structure, fertility and water conservation, thereby allowing marginalized land to become lush jungle over time.
- Many traditional communities throughout the world consider coconut palms the “Tree of Life”, as they provide a variety of accessible products from which they earn their livelihoods. The production of SweetTree organic coconut sugar has the single highest potential for lifting these farmers into a better life while creating a net benefit to their surrounding environment.
We at Sweet Tree Sustainable Sweeteners know that our name is only as good as our reputation and our reputation is only as good as the integrity of our product and our product is a direct result of our actions and intentions. We strive to be the best company in the world run by individuals who strive to be the best people we can be every day.
As any business, we strive to be the most profitable and efficient company we can be. With profit, a business can reinvest in it's supply chain and corporate social initiatives. We will never compromise our ideals of working transparently with our farmer partners, treading as lightly on this earth as possible and always taking actions to give back to the earth, creating and sourcing new exotic and healthy foods for the world, and most importantly, we will never stop seeing the art in our business. We encourage our company team members to have fun, be creative, think outside the box, give back to the world more than you take and to sit back and breathe, smile and give thanks for this life we have. This is the culture we nurture in our business. This is the business we bring to the world.
The founders of Sweet Tree Organic Coconut Palm Sugar, to further our goals of doing what we can to promote environmental stewardship, started the Big Tree Climate Fund, which promotes tree planting and other environmental-social programs around the globe. To learn more about our sister company, please visit www.bigtreeclimatefund.com
In our current era, every business has to undertake serious and accountable programs of sustainability in their business plans. Every business must give back. We have reached a point in time and industry where all things that we depend on to create our products are simply becoming scarcer and scarcer. Every business must look at ways to switch to renewable resources; be it packaging, alternative energy to power buildings or switching to organic ingredients. It's just smart business.
If a business can't get what it needs to make it's product, it won't be in business long. Sustainability isn't just good business practices, it's essential business practices.
So to our consumers, please ask your local store to carry our products in bulk and bring your own container to fill up with the coconut palm sugar. Then our need to make pouches is reduced and all of our environmental life footprints shrinks a little more.
*Organic Evaporated Coconut Palm Sugars are not produced from the same palm species as is used for the production of Palm Oil.
