Connection Thursday: the forest families in Kalimantan who harvest our illipe butter
Every jar of illipe butter we blend begins somewhere most people will never see: the forest floor of Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, where the illipe nut falls from towering Shorea trees at the end of the wet season.
It cannot be farmed on demand. The trees fruit on their own rhythm, once every few years, and only a healthy, standing rainforest fruits at all. So the harvest belongs to the families who live alongside those trees, who know the groves the way you know your own street, and who gather the nuts by hand as their parents and grandparents did before them.
We source this butter through our Forestwise partnership in Kalimantan. The arrangement is simple, and it is the whole point: the forest is worth more standing than cleared. When families earn a fair income from wild-harvested illipe and kukui, the trees that give those nuts are protected, not felled for timber or palm. The forest looks after them, so they look after the forest. What you give, you get back.
This is the quiet accounting behind a single ingredient. Illipe butter restores the skin barrier and melts at body temperature into a rich, cushioning balm. That is the part you feel. The part you do not feel is a grove still standing, a family still rooted on their land, and a harvest that will come again because nothing was taken that could not be given back.
We think care should work like this the whole way down: good for your skin, good for the hands that gathered it, and good for the place it came from. Not a marketing line, an accounting.
If you want to meet this ingredient up close, our guide comparing illipe butter and shea butter walks through how it feels, where it comes from, and why we reach for it.
That is the connection we return to every Thursday: behind every product is a person, a plant, and a place, all held in the same act of care.
