Our Purpose
The naturals trade only works if the forest and the families who tend it are still there in fifty years. Everything we do is downstream of that sentence.
A benzoin tree is tapped, not felled. That single fact is why the Tapanuli uplands still have forest on them, and it is also why the material is expensive, slow and occasionally unavailable. A house that wants cheap benzoin every year will eventually get it by pushing someone to clear and replant. We would rather have a difficult season.
So the purpose is not a statement about nature. It is a purchasing discipline: pay a floor price agreed before the season rather than after, buy at the station rather than through a consolidator, and keep the household attached to the lot all the way to the drum. Those three habits cost us margin, and they are the reason the gardens are still worth tending.
We are not trying to grow quickly. We are trying to be the house still buying from these slopes when the people tapping them now have grandchildren.
- 01
Answer for the lot
Every drum can be walked back to a collection point and a household. If it cannot, we do not ship it.
- 02
Price before the season
A floor price agreed while there is still time to plan is worth more to a tapper than a good price offered at harvest.
- 03
Grade by hand
Machines sort faster and worse. Three qualities, sorted by people who have done it for years, before anything reaches a still.
- 04
Publish the difficult years
The specification says what a bad season did to the vanillin range. Buyers plan better with the truth than with an average.
Read how the habits show up in the supply chain.
Responsible sourcing