Mother's Shea is a Northern Ghana shea butter export house founded in 2014, built on a simple premise: the women who harvest and process shea by hand should not be the last to benefit from its value. We work directly with cooperatives in the Tamale region, cutting out the layers of middlemen that historically separated harvesters from fair prices.
Every shipment we send is lab-tested and certificate-backed before it leaves our facility, and every cooperative we work with is paid at rates agreed before harvest season begins, not negotiated down once nuts are already perishable. It's a standard we adopted the hard way, and one we've held since.
Today that model moves roughly 1,200 tonnes of Grade A shea butter a year to buyers in more than 40 countries, sourced from a network of 60+ cooperatives and over 4,000 harvesters across the Northern Region. The warehouse district in Tamale is the same one we started in. The sourcing model is too.
We're still, at core, a company that believes a fair trade in shea butter is possible at export scale, and that proving it, shipment after shipment, is worth the extra rigour it takes.
We want Northern Ghana's shea belt recognised globally not just as a source of raw material, but as the origin of a product whose value chain treats the people at its start as fairly as the people at its end.
From a single cooperative's harvest to a full container shipment, we hold the same standard: pay agreed at the source, quality proven before it ships, and one named contact accountable for both.
Every decision we make gets weighed against three things: does it pay harvesters fairly, does it hold up to lab scrutiny, and does it leave the shea parklands better than we found them.
Harvesters, cooperative leaders, and quality checkers across our Northern Region network, the people a shipment's certificate of analysis doesn't show.
Cooperative payment rates are agreed before harvest season starts, not negotiated down once nuts are already picked and perishable. It removes the leverage that used to sit entirely with buyers.
Every batch is lab-tested against certificate of analysis before it leaves our facility, a rule we adopted the hard way, after a failed shipment in 2015, and have not broken since.
For every tree cleared for land use near our sourcing regions, our reforestation programme has committed to replanting at a ratio our field team tracks tree by tree, not as an offset calculation done at year-end.
We never set out to be the biggest shea exporter out of Ghana. We set out to be the one harvesters didn't have to negotiate down to, where a fair price was simply the starting point, not the outcome of a hard conversation.
