Organic Vital Beauty Powder

Recommended intake: Stir 8 g (1 scoop) into 250 ml of water, milk, or juice daily and consume immediately. Also suitable as an addition to smoothies or porridge.

Important information: Food supplements are not a substitute for a balanced, varied diet and healthy lifestyle. Do not exceed the stated recommended daily intake. Keep out of reach of young children.

Allergens: May contain traces of tree nuts (pistachio), milk, celery, mustard, sesame, sulfites, and cereals containing gluten.

Storage: As this natural product tends to clump quickly without artificial additives, we recommend sealing it carefully after each use and using it up promptly. Store in a cool, dry place, do not freeze, and protect from direct sunlight.

Açaí must be processed on the same day

Euterpe oleracea is a slender palm that grows up to twenty-five meters tall in the flooded forests of the Amazon. To this day, it is still harvested mostly as it always has been: the collectors climb the trunk and cut off the fruit clusters by hand.

After that, a race against time begins. The flesh forms only a thin layer around a large seed and spoils within a day because its high fat content oxidizes quickly. The fruit is therefore soaked, pulped, pasteurized, and then freeze-dried on site.

A berry that is more like an olive

Most berries store sugar. Açaí stores fat instead, mainly oleic acid, the same monounsaturated fatty acid that also characterizes olive oil. On a dry-mass basis, the flesh is about half made up of it.

That is why açaí tastes hardly sweet, but rather tart and slightly earthy, and why it is traditionally eaten in Brazil as a savory food too, with fish and cassava. Botanically, the fruit is not actually a berry, but a drupe with a single large seed.

Why the sweetener is not organic

Our label says that all ingredients except the sweetener come from organic cultivation. There is a legal reason for that. Steviol glycosides are not the leaf of the stevia plant, but individual substances extracted and purified from it, and as such they are considered a food additive with the number E 960.

For organic products, only a short, final list of additives is permitted, and sweeteners are not among them. So there can be no steviol glycoside labeled as organic. Dried stevia leaf, on the other hand, is not approved as a food in the EU.

Vanilla is an orchid

Vanilla planifolia is the only orchid from which a food is produced. Its flower opens for just a few hours on a single day. Outside Central America, the original pollinator is missing, which is why every single flower worldwide has to be pollinated by hand.

This technique was developed in 1841 by a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius on the island of Réunion; only then did cultivation outside Mexico become possible at all. The harvested pods are green and odorless. Their aroma develops only over months through scalding, sweating, and drying. Together, hand pollination and post-processing make vanilla, after saffron, the most expensive spice in the world.