Wholesome Sweeteners Organic raw blue agave, 23.5-Ounce Bottles (Pack of 6)

by Wholesome Sweeteners

Product Features

• Organic raw blue agave
• A richer fuller taste produced at temperatures below 118 F
• A low glycemic sweetener,
• An amber nectar
• Gluten free; Vegan; GMO free; Organic

Product Description

About the Brand

Wholesome Sweeteners brings the very best of nature's sweetness to you and your family every day. Wholesome believes in traditional ways, artisanal products and a very light environmental footprint. After searching the world for the best products, Wholesome has focused on the tropics, where the climate and conditions are just right for growing organic sweeteners. With Fair Trade Certified™ organic and natural sweeteners from Central and South America and Africa, Wholesome is committed to making the world a sweeter place, one spoonful at a time.

Company Overview

• Founded in 1995 in Sugar Land, Texas, Wholesome Sweeteners supplies the American market the highest quality natural and organic sweeteners from around the world.
• Wholesome Sweeteners pioneered efforts to bring sugar and honey into the Fair Trade movement and was the first to bring Fair Trade Certified sweeteners to American markets. Wholesome Sweeteners now offers a wide range of Fair Trade Certified, organic and natural sweeteners produced by traditional methods from nature’s best resources.

Fair Trade Certification is a promise that: Farmers’ cooperatives are paid directly (no middlemen). The members receive a fair and reliable set price for their crops. The cooperative has access to loans and additional premiums for community and business development. It’s trade, not aid. Cooperatives decide how the money is invested; the only stipulation is that every member has a vote in how the inves™ent is made.

Social Responsibility
The Fair Trade Certified™ logo represents Wholesome's commi™ent to consumers that a fair premium price is paid to the farmers’ cooperatives that supply Wholesome’s Fair Trade products.

Since initiating the Fair Trade Certified program in 2005, Wholesome Sweeteners has paid more than $800,000 directly to Fair Trade cooperative partners in Costa Rica, Malawi, Mexico and Paraguay. Fair Trade means that farmers can send their kids to school, keep their land, develop the quality of their harvest and build thriving communities.

Beyond the parameters of Fair Trade Certification, Wholesome selects suppliers based on a demonstrated commi™ent to social responsibility and community outreach.

Environmental Responsibility
Wholesome Sweeteners' ethos is shaped by a deep concern for the long-term health of the planet and all of its inhabitants.

The USDA Organic logo is Wholesome's promise that we hold every product to the highest environmental standard. Each product bearing the USDA Organic logo has been grown and milled to USDA Organic standards, without the aid of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides or chemicals.

Wholesome uses traditional methods:

• Fair Trade certification includes a commitment to sustainable agriculture. In recent years, unprecedented acreage has been converted from conventional agriculture to organic cultivation, reducing exposure to pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.
• From the seed stock to harvest, our sugar cane is cultivated and harvested by hand and grown without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides or herbicides.
• Wholesome’s cane fields are never burned. During the harvest, trimmings are allowed to stay where they fall, decomposing naturally, returning nutrients to the soil, helping protect topsoil and ground water and providing habitat for wildlife.
• At the small mills in Costa Rica, Malawi and Paraguay, our sweeteners are made simply and the spent sugar cane, called bagasse, is often recycled as fuel to generate electricity for the mill and nearby villages.
• Deep in Southern Mexico’s jungles, honeybees browse on lush wildflowers without exposure to antibiotics or chemicals.

Product Description

A low glycemic organic sweetener, Wholesome Sweeteners Premium Organic Agave is a natural nectar made from of the Blue Agave plant. Agave has a Low Glycemic Index (GI), so it is slowly absorbed into the body, preventing spikes in blood sugar. Raw Blue Agave nectar is produced at a low temperature (less than 118 degrees F) and has a full sweet flavor with subtle molasses tones. It is 1-1/4 times sweeter than sugar, use wherever you would table sugar. USDA Organic and kosher certified. Suitable for vegan, vegetarian, Halal and plant-based diets. Product of Mexico

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 9.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000FL08B0
• UPC: 012511212322
• Item model number: 21232
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (139 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,258 in Grocery & Gourmet Food (See Top 100 in Grocery & Gourmet Food)
  • #45 in Grocery & Gourmet Food > Cooking & Baking Supplies > Sugar Substitutes

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

78 of 80 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tastes Great, October 19, 2006

By 

L. Mifflin "homeschool mom" (Mountains of AZ, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wholesome Sweeteners Organic raw blue agave, 23.5-Ounce Bottles (Pack of 6) (Grocery)

This tastes great, I love it in my coffee, and have even used it for pancakes. It really doesn't give me a spike in blood sugar, as promised. The only negative is the packaging they are using. During shipping, some of the seals underneath the lids came off, and the bottles leaked. I probably lost about a tablespoon (each) from 3 of the 6 bottles. The lids don't really fit the bottles, either. They have a pop-top, but if you use it, the syrup sometimes leakes out from under the lid where it attaches to the bottle. If they could fix the bottles, this would definitely be a five-star product.

**Update** The product was not available for a few months, and when it came back--NEW PACKAGING!! My last shipment was sealed up tight. Five Stars for sure, but Amazon won't let me change that part.

58 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best quality agave currently available, April 4, 2008

By 

herzog - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wholesome Sweeteners Organic raw blue agave, 23.5-Ounce Bottles (Pack of 6) (Grocery)

Over the years I've done bulk buying for a housing cooperative and have dealt with wholesome sweeteners before - they sell everything from sucanat to organic corn syrup (blech). A lot of the other agave stuff on the market right now is simply from resellers trying to make a buck moving high margin natural foods products - this stuff is from a company that specializes in selling sweeteners and has a reputation for quality. You can't really beat it.

Uses: This stuff is perfect for tea - just a little bit takes the bitter edge off most black / green teas without overwhelming the flavor - and for making raw sweets. A lot of people like to use this stuff for baking, but I find it a bit expensive for this use - honey is cheaper and more readily available. This stuff is really healthy, but has to travel a lot of miles and uses a lot of packaging where both honey and maple syrup can be found locally in gallon jugs depending on where you live. Our coop actually buys honey in 60lb jugs :)

Note: Different companies advertise widely ranging glycemic index values for their agave syrups - enough so to make your head spin at how they could be so widely different for what appears to be the same product. Wholesome Sweeteners advertises 39 or less on their site, which is believable, where some companies advertise values as low as 21 with no analysis to back their claims up. To give you an idea of how this stuff compares glycemic index wise both honey & maple syrup have glycemic indexes around 55, corn syrup's is around 100, and white sugar's is around 110(!).

42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars PLEASE I implore you to do research before buying Blue Agave!, September 7, 2010

By 

R. Yoo (NYC, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wholesome Sweeteners Organic raw blue agave, 23.5-Ounce Bottles (Pack of 6) (Grocery)

Agave syrup (nectar) is basically high-fructose corn syrup masquerading as a health food.

Agave nectar has a low-glycemic index for one reason only: it's largely made of fructose, which although it has a low-glycemic index, is probably the single most damaging form of sugar when used as a sweetener. With the exception of pure liquid fructose, agave nectar has the highest fructose content of any commercial sweetener.

All sugar -- from table sugar to HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) to honey -- contains some mixture of fructose and glucose. Table sugar is 50/50, HFCS is 55/45. Agave nectar is a whopping 90 percent fructose, almost -- but not quite -- twice as high as High Fructose Corn Syrup!!!!

Based on the labeling, I could picture native peoples creating their own agave nectar from the wild agave plants. Surely, this was a traditional food, eaten for thousands of years. Sadly, it is not.

Native Mexican peoples do make a sort of sweetener out of the agave plant. It's called miel de agave, and it's made by boiling the agave sap for a couple of hours. Think of it as the Mexican version of authentic Canadian maple syrup.

But this is not what agave nectar is. According to one popular agave nectar manufacturer, "Agave nectar is a newly created sweetener, having been developed in the 1990s." In a recent article now posted on the Weston A. Price foundation's website, Ramiel Nagel and Sally Fallon Morell write,

Agave "nectar" is not made from the sap of the yucca or agave plant but from the starch of the giant pineapple-like, root bulb. The principal constituent of the agave root is starch, similar to the starch in corn or rice, and a complex carbohydrate called inulin, which is made up of chains of fructose molecules.Technically a highly indigestible fiber, inulin, which does not taste sweet, comprises about half of the carbohydrate content of agave.

The process by which agave glucose and inulin are converted into "nectar" is similar to the process by which corn starch is converted into HFCS. The agave starch is subject to an enzymatic and chemical process that converts the starch into a fructose-rich syrup--anywhere from 70 percent fructose and higher according to the agave nectar chemical profiles posted on agave nectar websites.

"Agave syrup is almost all fructose, highly processed sugar with great marketing," said Dr. Ingrid Kohlstadt, a fellow of the American College of Nutrition and an associate faculty member at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "Fructose interferes with healthy metabolism when (consumed) at higher doses", she told me. "Many people have fructose intolerance like lactose intolerance. They get acne or worse diabetes symptoms even though their blood [sugar] is OK".

Agave nectar syrup is a triumph of marketing over science. True, it has a low-glycemic index, but so does gasoline -- that doesn't mean it's good for you.

If you simply must have some sweets, a small amount of agave nectar every once in a while isn't going to kill you. Just don't buy into the idea that it's any better for you than plain old sugar or HFCS.

Info is taken from Jonny Bowden, PhD, C.N.S.


So please. I implore each and every one of you to do your own research on this sham of a product and tell everyone you know. Write letters and let the world know that we won't fall prey to loopholes in "Organic Marketing". The fact that so many people use this because they are diabetic is quite frightening.