We take pleasure in adding as much good, healthy and natural ingredients into our Ombars as possible. We take inspiration from nature - foods ought to taste great and be beneficial from health. If it doesn't meet these criteria, then why are we eating it? This is why we choose to add the whole fruit rather than just flavourings. We'll never add anything dodgy to our products, guaranteed.

Coconut Palm Sugar

The Most Sustainable Sweetener in the World

Coconut sugar is the name given to the evaporated nectar of the coconut palm tree. The nectar is collected by 'tappers' - small-scale farmers who climb the tall palm trees, cut the blossom and collect the sap in bamboo containers. The collected nectar is then gently heated over log fires to evaporate the water content and turn the nectar into a delicious, unrefined sugar. An interesting thing about coconut sugar is that it cannot be processed in large factories because the sugars ferment too quickly, so the sugar is produced by local farmers who are thus able to obtain a stable income throughout the year as the palm trees can be tapped every month. For this reason, coconut sugar is recognised as the most sustainable form of sugar by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and Mahatma Ghandi declared it's production as "a way to solve the world's poverty".

Our coconut sugar comes from Java, one of the islands of Indonesia. In Java our supplier cooperates with Lestari Mandiri, Fairworld and Hivos.

  • The Lestari association fights for the interests of small-scale farmers and their families in central Java.
  • Hivos is a humanitarian organisation working towards a fair, free and sustainable world. They also stand for equal opportunities.
  • In the Kulon Progo province in central Java, Fairworld see to it that the harvesting and production process of our coconut sugar is carried out according to organic and fair trade principles. Fairworld and Lestari are members of Organic Alliance, an organisation striving for more organic produce in Indonesia. Together they aim to provide an additional income for 2,000 families in Kulon Progo and to protect their habitat. The coconut trees in their gardens now yield their own harvest.

A Healthy Sweetener

Analysis of coconut sugar shows that it has a low glycemic index of 35 which is less than refined cane sugar (68), honey (48) and agave (40). This means you can eat Ombars without experiencing sugar 'highs' and inevitably, the 'lows'.

But is it raw?

No, coconut sugar is not a raw food. We used to use agave syrup to sweeten Ombars, but that had a lot of drawbacks and it is also coming to light that agave is not the healthy sweetener we all once thought, and most certainly not a raw food. We believe that coconut sugar is the best and most healthy sweetener available with the highest integrity. This, we feel trumps whether it's raw or not. We call Ombars raw chocolate because we want to communicate that they are made using truly raw cocoa.