ProTerra Foundation joins the Sustainable Spices Initiative (SSI)

The ProTerra Foundation is pleased to announce a new milestone in its collaboration agenda for sustainable agricultural supply chains. The ProTerra Foundation has joined the Sustainable Spices Initiative (SSI), as listed on the SSI website. Founded in 2012, the SSI is a sector-wide consortium that brings together companies and other actors active in spices, herbs and dehydrated vegetables, with the shared ambition to advance sustainable production, processing and trade through collective action.

For stakeholders across spice supply chains, this membership matters because it strengthens alignment on practical approaches to responsible sourcing. The spices sector faces increasing expectations on due diligence, traceability and measurable social and environmental performance, particularly across complex, smallholder-based supply chains. Through SSI, ProTerra will engage with peers and partners to support greater consistency in sustainability expectations, promote credible assurance, and contribute to sector learning and tools that can accelerate progress at scale. These further support harmonisation and comparability across sustainability expectations, helping reduce fragmentation and improve supplier engagement across origins.

This milestone also reinforces the applicability of the ProTerra Standard to spice supply chains. The ProTerra Standard is a multi-commodity framework designed for global application, including spices and their supply chains. It supports consistent sustainability requirements and robust traceability from farm to market, and it enables continuous improvement across diverse origins and supply chain stages. Given the central role of smallholders in many spice origins, ProTerra also provides a Smallholder Interpretation of the ProTerra Standard, supporting credible implementation and assurance in smallholder contexts.

In addition, ProTerra Regenera provides a complementary solution for this market by supporting credible progress on regenerative outcomes and ecosystem resilience, aligned with practical implementation across supply chains.

For ProTerra stakeholders, SSI provides an additional platform to align on shared priorities such as social sustainability, environmental performance and due diligence practices, and to support responsible sourcing decisions with credible, independently assessed assurance.

To learn more about this milestone and how the ProTerra Standard can support spice supply chains, please contact us via our website or at info@proterrafoundation.org.