Our Sourcing
Traceable Shea Butter Supply Chain, Northern Ghana
Every batch traces back to the cooperative that made it. Not a claim on a page, a real relationship the founders built themselves.
Why We Started
Good hands, hard work, and nowhere to sell it. That was the whole problem.
Kumtili Dikpong has spent years walking into the same compounds across Northern Ghana, watching women turn shea fruit into shea butter with their bare hands. He did not learn this from a report. He learned it standing next to them, bringing visitors in season after season to watch the whole process, start to finish.
The women he met were never short on skill. Their butter was good. Grade A good. What they were short on was someone to sell it to.
Here is what that looks like up close. A woman spends weeks cracking nuts, roasting, grinding, kneading a paste by hand until it turns from grey to gold. Then she carries it to a local market and takes whatever price shows up that day, if a buyer shows up at all. Some of it goes unsold. Some of it goes to waste.
Kumtili and Amina Pagnaa, both indigenes of the Dagbon Kingdom, saw that gap up close and decided to close it. Not with another donation. Not with another workshop. With customers.
We run this as a social enterprise, not a charity. Every order placed here moves real money back to the women who made the batch. That is the whole model.
What It Looks Like Up Close
Weeks of cracking, roasting, grinding, and kneading before a single batch is ready
This is the process behind every drum you buy: shea fruit turned into shea butter entirely by hand, the same women, the same compounds, season after season.
What we can and cannot claim, honestly
We would rather tell you the truth than put a badge on the site we cannot back up.
Every metric ton you buy deposits $100 into our Community Infrastructure Fund, split across education, health, conservation, and a direct bonus to the women who made your batch.
Questions about where this comes from
Named on request, along with the district they operate in. We do not publish every cooperative’s name publicly to protect the women who work with us, but any serious buyer gets full sourcing documentation.
Founder Kumtili Dikpong has worked directly with these cooperatives for years, not through a middleman. We set prices in person, with the women, not from a spreadsheet in another country.
Not yet certified. The trees are wild-grown and no pesticides are used, simply because none are available or affordable in the region, but we have not paid for the paperwork to prove it formally.
Every batch carries a code tied to the cooperative and collection window it came from. Enterprise buyers get the full chain, cooperative to container.
Want the full sourcing documentation?
Serious buyers get the named cooperative, district, and batch trace on request.
Request Sourcing Documentation