USDA Organic Certified

In 2017 we received our USDA Organic Certification from Baystate Organic Certifiers. 

 

We always used soley organic ingredients but in order to use the USDA logo and get in to some stories we need to get the official certification.

 

Baystate Organic Certifiers (BOC) helps us to continually vet our suppliers by reviewing our suppliers’ certificates of analyis for each of their ingredients in order to ensure that they are organically grown, are non-gmo, contain no additiaves, metals, bacterias and more. BOC also double checks that our suppliers organic certificates are update to date and legitimate. 

 

 

PBC – Public Benefit Corporation

For over 7 years Jahmu PBC has officially been in business as a public benefit corporation. What this means is that our core mission and values will always come before ‘shareholder value’. Bringing you healthy, organic high quality turmeric-ginger drink mixes is our highest priority. 

Since Novemeber 2017 we have been a Certified Benefit Corp. To join this small but growing group of business who choose to do good while doing well, we underwent a rigorous auditing and interview process that included over 220 pages of written documentation. To our surprise applying to become a Certified B Corp was as thorough as the USDA Organic Certification application.  

To us being a Certified B Corp means that we must practice what we preach in hollistic way – we must benefit the whole public – not just our customers. We must always be pursuing ways to do better – whether it sourcing supplies as locally as possible, further streamlining our production practices to use less energy and water, re-using packaging materials, and much more. 

Someday we hope the Certified B Corp status becomes as well known as the USDA Organic Certified status. For now, I encourage you to learn more about B Corps and when you come across one tip your hat to them for going the extra mile to good. 

Public Benefit Corporation PBC

Working Towards Environmentally Friendly Packaging

In effort to minimize our impact on the environment our products do not have secondary packaging. Why put Jahmu in a jar in a box with padding in a box with padding? Sounds redundant. All of our products are packed into glass jars with labels that can be removed fairly easily. This way you can reuse or recycle the jar when you’ve run out of Jahmu. Furthermore, one jar of Jahmu can make numerous cups of tea with out all of the packaging that goes into single server products. 

For many orders, we are now re-using packing peanuts that we receive when we buy jars. These packing peanuts are starch-based and water-soluble so they can be dissolved in your sink or even tossed into your compost. 

In order to keep shipping costs down, for small orders we have been using bubble wrap, eco lite mailers, and USPS supplied boxes and poly-mailers.  We hope you can reuse the bubble wrap. Recycling bubble wrap and padded envelopes is like recycling plastic bags – it may need to be taken to a special recycling location and cant simply be tossed in your household recycling bin. We have recently gotten samples of 100% recycled packaging and are working towards a more environmentally friendly yet affordable solution for shipping small jars.  

 We are required to put USDA organic on our packaging. We’ve chosen to use stamps not stickers. One ink pad lasts us months and yields thousands of stamps.

For wholesale orders please excuse the appearance of our because we re-use a wide variety of the packing materials including air bladders, recycled paper, bubble wrap, packing peanuts and boxes. 

We’ve been using Earth Hugger shipping tape, which I believe is made in North America from 50% recycled materials. 

 

Reused packaging materials

Offsetting Our Carbon Footprint

Jahmu PBC is supporting the CarbonFund because we want to lead the food industry towards long term sustainability. The food industry includes manufacturing (of equipment and packaging), transportation (of ingredients, products, or people going to get food), energy (for manufacturing, transportation, and storage), and, obviously, agriculture. Depending on how the umbrella of the food industry is defined it could easily be considered the greatest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. 

When shopping for groceries people have many considerations already on their mind including price, flavor, brand, organic status, origin, healthiness, and more. It’s too much to ask of the consumer to also factor in the product’s impact on the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why we as an industry need to raise our standards and reduce or offset our carbon footprints. Let’s make it a given that people are not destroying the environment when they eat or drink!

We are working torwards becoming officially certified carbon free but in the meantime we have done some back of the envelope calculations to more than offset our estimated carbon footprint.