Chocolate Energy Drink

Start your day with a cup of organic chocolate energy smoother than any coffee kick!  Discover the delicious synergy of raw cacao, energizing guarana powder, and low glycemic coconut sugar!  Cacao and guarana are bursting with brain boosting nutrients that lift your mood and give you sustained energy. Cacao also provides more cell-protecting antioxidants, as measured by ORAC tests, than almost any food on earth, and provides the same molecules our brain makes when we’re happy or in love!  It's more than health food - it's Essential Living Food.

To make this great drink mix we start with only the finest ingredients.  Most importantly is our premium quality, heirloom, 100% RAW cacao powder (hyperlink to cacao powder product page).  We carefully harvest and process cacao from the prized Ecuadorian strain, Cacao Nacional Fino de Aroma.  We mix this low fat, anti-oxidant powerhouse with coconut sugar (hyperlink to coconut sugar product page) a great new low-glycemic sweetener.  Coconut sugar doesn’t come from coconuts themselves, but from the palm trees from which they grow.  The flowers high in the trees are cut and the sap carefully collected.  This fragrant sap is them slowly cooked down into a fine crystalline sugar that won’t spike your blood sugar like white sugar does.

To finish off this hot or cold treat, we add guarana powder (not extract, which is mostly caffeine, but the whole plant ground to a fine powder) for a smooth energy kick, and a little lucuma powder, mesquite powder, and vanilla powder for just the right flavor.

Our rare, heirloom chocolate is cultivated in the pristine forests of Ecuador on more than 1,200 small family farms whose ecological techniques help revitalize the Earth.  The income from this premium product is helping to fund children's education and development in rural Ecuador. Our coconut sugar is far more sustainable than sugar cane and provides a profitable export for small organic farmers in Indonesia.

Ingredients: Organic Coconut Sugar, Organic RAW Cacao Powder, Organic Lucuma, Organic Mesquite, Organic Guarana, Organic Vanilla, Himalayan sea salt.
Note: coconut sugar in this product, although low glycemic, is not raw.   Allergen Information: Manufactured in a facility that processes tree nuts.  

Organic Coconut Sugar

This pure and simple cane sugar alternative is produced from the sweet juices of tropical coconut palm sugar blossoms. Traditional sugar farmers climb high into the canopy of swaying coconuts and harvest the sweet nectar by gently slicing the flower. Once collected, the nectars are kettle-boiled into a thick caramel and ground to a fine crystal.

Coconut sugar has long been a staple for south East Asian culinary heritage and herbal medicine.

Coconut Sugar is naturally low on the Glycemic Index (GI), which has benefits for weight control and improving glucose and lipid levels in people with diabetes (type 1 and type 2).

   * Coconut Sugar is rated as a GI 35. By comparison, most commercial Honeys are GI 55 and Cane Sugars are GI 68.
   * Coconut Sugar has a nutritional content far richer than all other commercially available sweeteners.
   * Coconut Sugar is especially high in Potassium, Magnesium, Zinc and Iron and is a natural source of the vitamins B1, B2, B3, B6 and C.
   * Coconut Sugar is a 100% Organic, unprocessed, unfiltered, and unbleached natural sweetener. And contains no preservatives.
   * This coconut sugar is produced by smallholder farmers. 100% of the money from growing, harvesting and primary processing of this ingredient stays in the local community.
   * Through market access and production training, smallholder sugar tappers have risen well above the poverty line and are able to earn an increase in personal income of close to 200%, while maintaining a competitive market price as a cane sugar alternative!
   * The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the World Bank has reported that palm sweeteners like this coconut sugar are the single most sustainable sweetener in the world!
   * Coconut Sugars are not produced from the same palm species as is used for the production of Palm Oil.
   * Coconut Palms produce an average of 50-75% more sugar per acre than Sugar Cane and use less than 1/5th the nutrients for that production.
   * Tropical palms are an ecologically beneficial tree crop that grows in diverse, wild-life supportive agro-ecosystems, restore damaged soils and require very little water.
   * Coconut Palms are considered the “Tree of Life” by many traditional communities throughout the world as they provide over 100 smallholder accessible products from which to make livelihoods. The production of Coconut Sugar has the single highest potential for lifting these farmers into a better life while creating a net benefit to their surrounding environment.


ABOUT ESSENTIAL LIVING FOODS

Social Impact

At Essential Living Foods, we believe that business needs to have a positive impact on the world, using the power of commerce to improve lives, communities, and ecosystems. We strive to be a “good corporate citizen” in a multitude of ways, creating positive social impact with our business model, the partners we choose, giving back a portion of our revenues and profits, how we treat our employees, and the nutritional and healing properties of our products. Everyone who works here feels great about doing something good in the world while earning a decent living at the same time.

Fair Trade

Essential Living Foods started as an importer of unique organic foods, and from the beginning we’ve built our business on paying fair prices to our farming partners. We do our best to go directly to the source whenever possible, bypassing middleman so we can deliver the best value to our customers AND pay premium prices to the growers. There are a few different certifying organizations out there putting a third party seal on these fair trade practices. We are working with all of them to get these seals in place, but even while that is in process, you can rest assured that your purchases from Essential Living Foods is supporting farmers through equitable trade practices!

Giving Back

We don’t just pay fair prices for our foods – we share our success with our farming communities by giving back a portion of what we make.

Sustainability

Sustainability is a big word for us. It means that we have to sustain our business, because if we aren’t profitable and growing, we won’t exist in the future to continue doing the good that we’re doing. It also means that we want to do everything we can to not deplete non-renewable resources and to rebuild and protect fragile ecosystems. We do this at the farm level by the organic agriculture techniques we use, as well as things like powering our office on solar power and buying carbon credits to offset all of our corporate air travel and all of our food import transportation carbon emissions.

Partners

Money flows around and around. We make money from the sales of our products, and we try to do as much good as we can with how and from whom we purchase our foods from. But aside from buying our amazing, healthy, organic superfoods, we also spend a lot of money each year on more mundane items like banking services, legal services, etc. We try to find companies of a like mind to ours to work with. We find that they understand us better, and hence can offer us better service, and we feel good that we can keep the prosperity flowing to other companies doing good in the world. Check out this link to see just some of these great partners we have!