In 1967 Marcel Mauss, the French sociologist, called food, “a total social fact.” Fifty years after his proclamation, the same sentiment stands true. There are a lot of things we can disagree on these days, but at the end of the day we all need to eat and as a culture, we are infatuated with food. There are countless social channels dedicated to watching people eat, thousands of food blogs and cookbooks, television channels dedicated solely to the subject and writers whose sole purposed is to draft prose about how and why we eat.
Today, though, there are hard truths about food that are forcing us to re-examine our relationship to how it’s grown, processed and distributed. No longer does an ingredient travel directly from farm to table. Nowadays, it can pass through as many as nine touch points before it arrives on our plate. We’ve greatly reduced the diversity of seeds, too. Close to one hundred percent of the food energy in the world relies on just 30 crops, and since the 1900s, the United States has lost more than ninety percent of fruit and vegetable varietals. We also live in a rapidly changing global climate with increasing temperatures and weather disasters that greatly impact what foods can thrive. And aside from these changes, we’ve built a supply chain that relies heavily on certain regions to provide ingredients worldwide. Should those supply chains be shut off, millions could lose access to food sources.
These are shared challenges that we can alleviate if we work together. At Terra Ingredients, we strive to be part of the solution so that everyone can have access to quality organic foods.
The Terra Way
Terra Ingredients is dedicated to cleaning up a broken system in order to create a sustainable future for our planet. For the last two decades we’ve steadily built a reliable and trustworthy organic food supply chain that benefits the consumer, the farmer and their local communities. Our strategy isn’t to build a system focused solely on the bottom line, we’re more interested in investing in long-term relationships and growing in tandem with our customers. “When you buy from Terra ingredients, you buy directly from the source,” says Malick Diedhiou, a Terra Ingredients Commodity Trader. “We’re not coming in, buying a grain and leaving,” adds Peter Carlson, Terra Ingredients’ Director. “We’re forming relationships. Whether it’s the flax farmer in North Dakota or the chickpea farmer in Argentina, we stay with people over the long term.”
Think of it as the Terra Way. When you partner with Terra to source organic ingredients, not only will we work efficiently and effectively to help you feed the world and tailor our offerings to your specific needs, we’ll offer additional services, like supply chain intelligence, support traceability and risk management and mitigation, that will help you make informed decisions and predict future trends. “We’re leading the competition in bringing quality products to the market,” says Carlson. “In a world where everyone is trying to promote themselves loudly, we’re trying to provide good value.”
Terra Ingredients has invested 20 years of time, energy and resources into creating a better organic food supply chain that stretches from farmer to FSMA-compliant ingredients. “We’re processing experts,” says Carlson. “We know what our customers needs.” Terra believes in the power of building systems that support quality organic food in order to combat shared issues like climate change and food insecurity. Instead of ingredients passing a series of hands that might alter them or tack on unnecessary lag times, Terra works directly with farmers to create a shortened supply chain that starts with the farmer we’ve established long-term relationships with and gets to food manufacturers in one single step; through us.
Investing in the Future
At Terra Ingredients we believe in working with our partners to build a more sustainable and equitable food system. We also believe in looking to the future. Our latest project is in fonio, the ancient grain that has been grown for centuries in West Africa. Fonio is positioned to be the next big thing in food. It has the ability to thrive in increasing climactic temperatures and can withstand drought and other weather shifts that bring soil fatigue. Fonio is gluten-free and nutrient-dense, has a low glycemic index and is fast and easy to cook. It’s versatile and can be easily adapted to mixes, baked goods or other manufactured food products. Adding fonio to a recipe is an easy way to provide more nutritional value to any food.
The reason you probably haven’t heard of fonio yet is because it’s traditionally been raised and harvested by hand and, for that reason, impossible to scale. But Terra Ingredients has partnered with a manufacturer in Senegal that can dehull, clean and process fonio in a standardized way so we can bring this valuable ingredient to market. “Our family-owned partner (CAA) processing facility in West Africa allows us to transform raw fonio into ready to eat form,” says Diedhiou. “We’ve also built an extensive network of growers in the fonio belt that allow us to source fonio in a sustainable and ethical way.” Terra sources fonio using full traceability of their supply chain—from farmer to manufacturer—offering a window of transparency that makes them stand apart.
