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Renewal from Crisis
Original Beans Launches the World's First 100% Regenerative Couverture
Do We Return to Normal - or to Regenerative?!
Finally... These were summer weeks we had all been waiting for. After months of Corona induced lockdowns, even the air felt different as restaurants and hotels started to re-open and people came together again. How about cold drinks in the garden of your favourite restaurant? And that postponed hide-away trip with your partner? It was time for us to wake up again like animals after winter. We might soon come back to normal, many of us thought.
And so it wasn't... Instead, the crisis is deepening. Nature hits hard against her maltreatment after people ate animals and carried the disease over to our kind. More than ever, things seem to be intertwined. From animals to diners, from rainforests to chocolate lovers. As the weather hits new records, we are urgently reminded how our well-being depends on nature. We are only part of her, after all. For our own sake we must "regenerate what we consume and preserve what’s rare" as our company mission at Original Beans puts it.
Regenerate Hospitality - for the Long-term!
“Every crisis hides an opportunity", an old Chinese proverb goes. "You just have to be willing to see it!" At Original Beans we watch with agony the crisis of our hospitality customers and friends. But we see them come out on the other side leading even stronger on the big stuff: nature, people and integrity.
As supplier to the world's best chefs and hotels we feel called to contribute. And so, out of the crisis, we are launching the world's first 100% regenerative line of couvertures!
Every feature of Original Beans Rainforest Couvertures is meant to push beyond "sustainability" - from their climate-healing carbon balance to their QR code that tracks ten trees grown per bag (ten!) in that particular cacao origin.
Today's chefs and hoteliers are acutely aware of waste streams, including food waste. We support their amazing progress with another breakthrough innovation: the world's first garden-compostable couverture pack. The new material is one-third more expensive at this stage, but we have decided to absorb those costs. We want to empower everyone ready to make a choice for change so together we regenerate what we consume.
Plastic Is Like Corona: It Spreads Where It Shouldn’t.
Nature wastes nothing: the waste of one creature becomes the food of another one and so on. Any packaging should follow this law. Plastic doesn't and so inflicts us like Corona: it spreads where it shouldn’t. 32% of all plastic packaging ends up in nature! If this continues, in 2050 there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish. How about a trip to the beach and instead of shells there is only garbage? We know that plastic has filtered in the water we drink. We simply cannot ignore it. “There is only one solution to avoid plastic ending up in nature and our bodies”, says Philipp Kauffmann, founder and Chief Grower at Original Beans. “We must eliminate it”.
NOW NEW: The World’s First Compostable Couverture Bag
In 2012, as you may remember, our product team developed and launched the first garden-compostable packaging in the 100 billion dollar chocolate industry. Light, silver, beautiful —regenerative. It proved a challenge back then, but we did it. In 2018, as the world was starting to fight plastic pollution, our product team was at it again. For sixteen months we developed a new foil and tested it. In the tight, trusted team effort that pioneer projects demand, we worked with innovators from different organisations, led by one of Europe’s best eco-packaging engineers, Arie Gelein. In January 2020, only days before our project deadline, the first bags came off the machine sound and sealed.
A Plastic-free Pioneer Product
The Rainforest Couvertures pack is made from wood fibres rather than plastic or aluminium or a combination of both. So it is natural, renewable and organically compostable. To protect the chocolates from light and oxygen and in perfect condition an ultra-thin layer of natural aluminium is steamed onto the wood foil. This layer is 0,6 nanometers thin and slows composting only by a matter of days: aluminium is the most abundant metal on earth. As luxurious as the new Rainforest Couvertures bag looks, you can dispose of it in the compost bin or the paper recycle box.
What Else Is 100% Regenerative in the Rainforest Couvertures?
We believe in the power of trees and that healthy forests are the best way to regenerate our Earth. Together with our customers and growers we have grown millions of trees to date. Now we are even increasing our commitment: each bag of a new Rainforest Couverture grows ten trees in the cacao origins. These trees are a gift to the growers and empower them to regenerate their land and forests. You can track them down to nursery level via a QR code on each product. The trees help catch water, protect soils, drawdown carbon to stabilise the local and global climate, and protect rare wildlife and people. The latter are charismatically depicted and described on each pack. We call them our heroes. They act as ambassadors of their region, its uniqueness and its preservation value for the long-term. Much like the couvertures themselves, they call on us together to regenerate what we consume and preserve what’s rare in the world, one Original Beans chocolate at a time.
Compost It!
Garden composting is a good way to recycle. The ultra-thin aluminium layer (0,6 Nanometer) we have applied to keep our chocolates in perfect condition and protect them from light slows the foil’s natural degradation only by a matter of days. It does not interfere with bio-compostability in any other way. Aluminium is the most common metal in the earth’s crust and occurs naturally in soils.