Ask what the hardest part of making raw Shea butter is and most people picture the whipping. Hours of it, arms deep in dark paste, until the fat finally separates and the colour turns pale gold. Fair enough, that is the step that looks like the work.
Here is the part nobody pictures. You can do all eight steps perfectly, across days, with thousands of nuts cracked one at a time, and still lose the whole batch in the last ten minutes. The woman standing at that point of the process is Tembire Aduabono.
The job with no glamour and no margin for error
Tembire is responsible for packaging at our cooperative. Every finished batch goes through her hands before it leaves the village, and she describes her own work better than I could:
"The right packaging is very important. We want to make sure the properties of Shea butter are as powerful when the customer opens the package as they are when we first make the product."
That is the whole argument for taking the last step as seriously as the first seven. A pouch that seals badly turns days of expert work into an expensive disappointment somewhere in the middle of an ocean.
What she is actually protecting
Our Shea butter is unrefined, unbleached and undeodorized. Nothing is added, which also means nothing is added to protect it. What keeps it in good condition is a proper seal, a cool place and no sunlight. Air, heat and light are the three things that quietly undo what the women spent days building.
This is also the honest answer to the question we get more than any other, which is why we never sell Shea butter in jars. Think about where your pouch has to go. It is sealed by Tembire in a village in the savannah of Northern Ghana, carried for hours over roads that were not built for anything delicate, and then put on a ship and sent across the Atlantic to reach you. Glass and clay are heavy and crack somewhere along that route. Metal heats up on a long crossing through the tropics, and heat is precisely what turns raw Shea butter into a grainy mess. A sealed pouch is light, it does not shatter, and it keeps air and light away from the butter the entire way. We have looked for something better and have not found it yet.
Once your butter has crossed the savannah and the ocean and made it to your bathroom shelf, decant as much as you like into any jar, tin or calabash you already own and keep the rest sealed. Tembire's job is to get it to you intact. What it lives in after that is your business.
Corn, millet, and four daughters
Before the cooperative, Tembire's income came from growing corn and millet and selling it at the local market. One harvest, one market day, one price she had no part in setting. Anyone who has ever run a business on a single unpredictable revenue line will recognise the feeling, and most of us at least get to do it with a roof and a bank account.
She is a widow. She lives with her husband's family, who help raise her four daughters, and she is matter of fact about single motherhood being hard work regardless of who is helping. What she does with the Shea income is no mystery to her:
"Thanks to Shea butter I am able to provide good education for all my daughters and that is the most important thing for me."
Let me be precise about what that sentence is. It is a wage doing what wages do. Tembire is paid for skilled work, the money is hers, and she spends it on her own priorities. Every child of the women in this cooperative is in school, and that is a payroll outcome rather than a donation outcome. We wrote about the difference in children out of school, not in our Shea butter village.
Her ambition is a floor plan
The line of hers I think about most has nothing to do with her daughters. It is about square footage. She hopes that in a few years production will be so big that it no longer fits in the rooms.
That is not a wish, it is a complaint about the building filed several years early, and I love it. It also tells you how these women think about the cooperative. Not as a project that arrived and might leave again, but as a business with a space problem coming.
The cooperative's capacity already runs ahead of our order volume. So the thing standing between Tembire and her overcrowded storage rooms is not Tembire. It is how many people decide they want the real thing.
Her message, which I am not going to improve
"Wherever in the world you open your Shea butter, I hope you'll like it as much as we do."
That is from the woman who sealed it. If you want to see the seven steps that happen before hers, read how our Shea butter is made, and meet the rest of the group in Love at Our Shea Butter Co-op. The village is on Instagram most days.
FAQ
Who packs FairTale GHANA Shea butter?
Tembire Aduabono, who is responsible for packaging at the women's cooperative in Northern Ghana. Every batch is sealed in the village where it was made.
Why is FairTale GHANA Shea butter not sold in jars?
Because of the trip it has to survive. Glass and clay are heavy and break. Metal heats up crossing the tropics, and heat is what turns raw Shea butter into a grainy mess. A sealed pouch is light, unbreakable and keeps out air and light the whole way, across the savannah, over the Atlantic, to your door. We have not found a better solution yet. Once it is home, decant a working amount into any container you already own and keep the rest sealed in the pouch.
How should I store raw Shea butter?
Sealed, cool and away from direct sunlight. Raw Shea butter contains no preservatives, so the packaging and the storage are what keep it in good condition.
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