The fruit of a thousand-year-old tree

The baobab is the tree in the children's picture books, the fat one with branches like roots, and a good one is a thousand years old. It grows across the African savannah and once a year it produces a hard green pod that nobody picks. The fruit inside dries on the branch, in the heat, into a chalky white powder, and that powder is the ingredient.

It is one of the few fruits in the world that arrives already dried, which means almost nothing has to be done to it. Crack the pod, sieve out the seeds, and you have a fruit powder with a taste somewhere between pear and sherbet.

The numbers are what sold us. Roughly half of baobab powder by weight is fibre, most of it the soluble kind the gut bacteria like best. It has around six times the vitamin C of an orange, gram for gram, and more potassium than a banana by a long way, with magnesium and calcium alongside. We believe fibre is better taken as a fruit than as an extract, because it arrives with the vitamins and minerals the plant grew with it, and baobab is about the most concentrated example of that anywhere.

It has been food in Africa for as long as there have been people in Africa. In Britain and Europe it has only been approved as a food since 2008, which tells you something about how slowly good things travel. It is in the scoop as Fibriss, a brand of baobab fruit powder, alongside the agave inulin. Two kinds of fibre, from a plant and a fruit.