Baobab Fruit Powder, 250g

Description

Baobab fruit powder is the dried pulp of Adansonia digitata, 250 grams in the pouch, 25 servings of about 10 grams, which works out near 96 cents a serving. The unusual thing about this fruit is that it dries itself. The pulp dehydrates inside the hard pod while it still hangs on the tree, so making baobab fruit powder means cracking the pod, separating the seeds and fibres and sieving what is left. There is no drying step and nothing is added.

What is in the pouch

Why baobab fruit powder is sold by the gram

A 10 gram scoop is a food sized serving, not a capsule sized one, and that tells you what sort of product this is. It is a fruit, concentrated only by having lost its water on the branch, so the figures that matter are grams per serving, servings per pouch and cost per gram. Anything sold at 500 mg in a capsule is a different purchase with a different arithmetic behind it.

Roughly half the weight of dried baobab pulp is fibre, much of it the soluble pectin type, which is why the powder thickens slightly in water and why the serving is measured in grams. The assayed figures for your lot are on the certificate. Our note on price per milligram explains why the per gram figure sits under the price on every listing here.

Vitamin C, with the caveat attached

Baobab pulp carries ascorbic acid, and the content varies with the tree, the season and the harvest, which is why we publish the lot assay instead of a single marketing figure that would hold for one batch. For scale, adult intake references are 75 mg for women and 90 mg for men, which you can check on the NIH vitamin C fact sheet. Compare assayed milligrams against price and the comparison with a tablet becomes straightforward. Those intake figures describe published reference values rather than an effect of this pouch.

Baobab fruit powder against a baobab capsule

Capsules of this fruit exist and they are a strange product. At 500 mg a capsule you would need twenty of them to reach the 10 gram serving on this pouch, which is why powder is the only format that makes arithmetic sense for a food. The capsule versions are sold on the front label rather than on the panel. Baobab fruit powder is cheaper per gram by a wide margin and the serving is a spoon rather than a handful.

What baobab fruit powder does in water, and in food

It is tangy rather than sweet, closer to sour citrus than to a dried berry, and the soluble fibre gives it a slight body in liquid. Ten grams in a glass of water is noticeably sour. The same amount in yoghurt or a smoothie disappears. Baobab fruit powder also works stirred into porridge, where the acidity is useful. None of that affects the assay. It affects whether the pouch gets finished, which is a different kind of value.

Wild harvest, and what that means in practice

Baobab is not farmed at scale. The fruit is collected from standing trees, mostly by rural harvesters in southern and eastern Africa, which is a genuine supply chain difference from a cultivated crop and also a source of batch variation. We state the harvest origin on the certificate where the supplier documents it and leave the rest unsaid rather than printing a story about it.

Testing

Every lot of baobab fruit powder is assayed by an independent laboratory for its vitamin C and mineral figures, and screened for lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury and microbials. Dried fruit powders concentrate whatever the soil held, so the metals panel matters here. Under specification lots are withdrawn and the failing certificate stays published. For the format of those reports, see how to read a certificate of analysis.

It mixes into cold water, yoghurt or juice and it is sour on its own. The rest of the fruit and leaf powders sit on the greens and wholefood page, and the certificate for this lot is linked above.