Kokum Butter

Kokum is our anchor butter, and the reason the company exists. Sindhudurg district, where we source, is the only place on earth where the tree grows commercially. Every year the forest produces roughly 40,000 metric tonnes of fruit — most of which is dried for kitchen use. The kernel, hidden inside the dark-red flesh, is frequently discarded. We buy those kernels from the same co-operatives our grandparents bought salt from.

Laboratory work tells us what the skin already knows. Stearic acid hovers above seventy percent. Oleic acid sits just below twenty. The melt point is locked between 37 and 40°C — exactly body temperature. Iodine values land between 33 and 40, making the butter remarkably oxidation-resistant compared with softer lipids. And comedogenicity, measured against the standard panel, returns a value that rounds cleanly to zero.

A butter that does not ask to be noticed, but changes every texture it touches.

Formulators use it three ways. As an emollient at 3 to 8 percent, it replaces some of the heavier shea in a balm without losing payoff. As a structural booster at 10 to 15 percent in stick formats, it holds shape through Indian summers without palm wax. And at high loads in treatment balms — 20 percent plus — it does something softer butters cannot: it crystallises in stable β-prime form, giving a velvety snap that consumers interpret as expensive.