Organic Certification Status · What We Can and Cannot Claim

Honest mapping of the certification status of every Essential Care Plus ingredient. No organic certification is currently held, by us or by our cooperatives. What we document instead: origin, cooperative, harvest and processing method, per lot.

“Organic” is a regulated label, not a marketing claim. We do not use it for ingredients that are not actually certified, and at present Essential Care Plus holds no organic certification, and none of our partner cooperatives hold one either. This page maps each ingredient to its real status so your formulator or QA team knows exactly what your label can and cannot say.

We would rather lose a sale than have a client fail an audit on the strength of something we wrote.

Certified organic

None. No Essential Care Plus ingredient is currently certified organic under USDA NOP, EU Regulation 2018/848, Defra or any equivalent scheme. Neither we nor our partner cooperatives hold a valid certificate today. If a listing anywhere states otherwise about our products, it is wrong and we would like to know about it.

Certification work is under consideration for parts of the cooperative network. We will publish the certifying body and the certificate number on this page the day it exists, and not before.

Wild-harvested, not certifiable, but documented

Organic certification schemes are built around cultivated land with a traceable input history. They do not map onto wild populations, which is why these ingredients could not be certified even if we pursued it. What we supply instead is provenance documentation.

  • Lake Chad Spirulina (Dihé), wild-harvested from natural alkaline ponds by the Kanembu women. We supply the harvest log, the harvest location, and a water-quality test of the source pond.
  • Chebe Powder, gathered by the Bassara women using traditional methods. Cherry pit kernels, mahaleb and samour resin are wild-gathered, not cultivated. We document the gathering process and the partner cooperative.
  • Ambunu Leaves, gathered wild in Guéra. Same status and same documentation as chebe.

Cooperative-grown without synthetic inputs, uncertified

These ingredients are cultivated, so certification would in principle be possible. It has not been done. What we can document is the growing and processing method of your specific lot, not a third-party audit of it.

  • Raw Shea Butter (Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina Faso), the shea trees are not planted, they are wild-standing in producer-cooperative parklands. The cooperative applies no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, since its economic model does not include either. Uncertified, because certifying a wild parkland is not currently practical.
  • Moringa Powder (southern Benin and the Tamale corridor, Ghana), grown on smallholder agroforestry plots, shade-dried. Uncertified.
  • Hibiscus Calyx (Sahel), rain-fed smallholder cultivation, hand-harvested and sun-dried. Uncertified.
  • Cocoa Powder and Raw Cocoa Butter (Bondoukou, Côte d’Ivoire), cooperative smallholder cultivation. Uncertified.
  • Whole Cloves, sourced through the West African spice trade and hand-graded. Uncertified.

What this means for your label

If you sell into a market where “organic” is regulated, the United States under USDA NOP, the European Union under Regulation 2018/848, the United Kingdom under Defra, do not label any finished product containing our ingredients as organic. None of our inputs can support that claim.

What you can substantiate with our documentation: single origin, named cooperative, harvest date and location, processing method, and the analytical profile of the lot. For many brands that story is more compelling than a certification logo, and it is one very few suppliers can actually evidence.

If your formulation genuinely requires certified organic input, tell us at the quote stage. We will say so plainly rather than sell you a lot that cannot carry your label.

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