Vembar Karuppatti Farmers Producer Company Limited

Our place is located on 1/16 North Street in Erumaikulam. If you know the area, you know it’s a small village where everyone is pretty much involved in some kind of farming. We mostly focus on Karuppatti, which is that traditional palm sugar everyone around here uses. It’s a lot of manual work, and we aren't sitting in air-conditioned offices all day. Most of the time, we are out near the trees or dealing with the heat from the processing. The company is basically just a group of us farmers who decided to pool our resources together. We aren't experts at business talk or anything like that. We just know how to make good palm sugar and how to keep the trees healthy. The office on North Street is usually where we store the finished bags before they get sent out. It can get a bit dusty and the smell of the boiling sap is everywhere during the season. We don't have a big marketing team or anything. Word of mouth is mostly how people find out about what we are doing in Erumaikulam. It’s a slow life, but it’s what we know. Sometimes we argue about the price of fuel or the weather, but at the end of the day, we are all neighbors. We just want to make sure the work we do keeps the village going and provides for our families. It is honest work and we take it seriously.