Sweetly sustainable Truvia®
Setting environmental standards for Truvia® brand of stevia sweetener
March 13, 2014
We’re constantly looking for ways to make our products more sustainable and beneficial for the communities that produce them. That’s why we developed a sustainable agriculture standard in October 2011 for stevia cultivation. The standard seeks to broadly address growing practices and ensure stevia is not grown on conservation or protected land.
It’s one way we’re working to strengthen the sustainability of Truvia® sweetener, which also includes our goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, water use and waste. These goals were the driving force behind making Truvia® sweetener the first stevia-based sweetener certified for its carbon footprint, with the ultimate aim of becoming carbon-neutral and zero-waste by 2020. In fact, processing improvements have already helped us reduce the amount of water used through 2012 by more than 40 percent, largely due to improved yields.
Cargill also launched a new partnership with the United Nations World Food Programme to reach children who need better nutrition in rural areas of Bolivia. By the end of the first year of the partnership, we had provided funding to supplement nutritious school meals for more than 36,000 children and to install 250 cleaner-burning cook stoves in these schools.