SWEET REVENGE SUGAR CO….an awesome for-profit, for-purpose company that’s changing the world by hacking our sweet-teeth, sustainably…one delicious recipe at a time.

We’re excited to put the spotlight on our newest member to the COMMON community, Carmel Hagen and Sweet Revenge Sugar Co. Does the name sound familiar? It should. Carmel is far from new to COMMON. In fact she was our first CMO, so we were both thrilled and honored when she said “yes” to our beta CM program for businesses. Our official launch of the CM program will happen soon, but in the meantime, here’s a great example of an awesome for-profit, for-purpose company that’s changing the world by hacking our sweet-teeth, sustainably…one delicious recipe at a time.

Read her thoughts on responsible decadence, scalable change, and what radical success looks like for our health, happiness, and the environment, below:

I love being in the kitchen. For me, baking is a moving meditation, a way to flex my creative muscles and be totally present, then enjoy a really awesome reward at the end. I’ve loved baking since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I really dug into the reasons refined sugar is such a menace that I started experimenting with natural alternatives. I wanted to be able to bake without hurting the earth or the other creatures on it, while also minimizing sugar’s effect on my body. This turned out to be a bigger mission than I could have ever anticipated.

The number one reason why refined sugar is bad — for us and the planet — is pretty simple: we produce and consume too much of it. But sugar isn’t inherently evil, it’s just insanely over-administered and under-regulated. It’s really a living legacy of the old-school business practices that we’re all ready to throw out the window — stuff like human rights violations; over-farming at the expense of fragile ecosystems; GMOs creeping in without us knowing about it, and shady lobbying and business practices that maximize profits at the expense of public health. Still, for a baker like me, refined sugar is a hard thing to surrender. I didn’t want to give my favorite recipes up, but it was a huge challenge to bring in natural, chemical-free alternatives like honey or maple syrup without totally changing the final product. Everything required tinkering and recipe modifications, and some recipes became fully impossible. It sucked.

So I kept trying every option I could find, and one day I found some granulated coconut nectar on the bottom shelf of a local health food store. I took it home, got down to work, and immediately thought, ”where have you been all my life, mi amor?” I was using it cup-for-cup, in everything from pastry cream to caramel to red velvet cake, without a single recipe modification. It’s caramelly flavor never butted heads with my other ingredients, and its source, the coconut palm, turned out to be the most sustainable source of sweetener in the world. I fully adopted coconut nectar into my kitchen, and never went back. There just wasn’t a compelling reason to, where baking was concerned. It just worked.

But over five years after I first started using it, awareness hadn’t really gone anywhere. None of my friends had a clue it existed. So finally I thought “Ok, enough. This is a good thing with a great story and even greater potential, it just needs a spotlight. I’m going in.”

The opportunity for Sweet Revenge is to redesign the sweetener industry from scratch. It’s a big enough opportunity to be laughable, which I think means we’re on the right track. If we can provide a sustainably scalable alternative to refined sugar that consumers love, then build that business according to the principles of mindful consumption and capitalism, we can make a real dent in the damage that’s currently being done to the planet and its inhabitants. It’s also our mission to escape the crazy bottom line that demands sneaking sweeteners into every product possible, and introduce a more mindful style of decadence to the way we treat ourselves. We need to nudge our sweetener consumption back into balance, and start thinking about treats the same way we do about, for example, wine: enjoy a glass, but don’t down the whole bottle. Quality over quantity, everything in moderation, all that jazz. We have to work together. But the health and environmental payoff is going to be huge.

CHECKOUT SWEET REVENGE

Company URL: http://sweetrevengesugar.co
Buy: http://sweetrevengesugar.co/buy-sweet-revenge/
Company Twitter: @EnjoyRevenge
Company Instagram: @enjoyrevenge
Carmel’s Twitter: @carmelelise