Dumbara Kithul Jaggery is a solid sweetener made from the sap of the Kithul palm, a wild-growing fishtail palm native to Sri Lanka. The sap is drawn from the palm's flower cluster, then boiled at length until nearly all its moisture has been driven off, at which point it is poured into moulds and left to set into firm, deeply flavoured blocks. The result is a sweetener with a character entirely its own — warm, earthy, and distinctly different from cane sugar or any other common sweetener.
Dumbara Natural Foods, based in Kengalla, a village roughly ten kilometres from Kandy in Sri Lanka's Central Province, has been producing Kithul-based sweeteners since 2006. The sole ingredient in this jaggery is 100% pure Kithul syrup from Caryota urens, the species tapped by Sri Lankan artisans across thirteen districts spanning the Southern, Central, Sabaragamuwa, and Uva Provinces. The tradition of Kithul tapping — known as Kithul Madeema or Kithul Kapeema — was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2025, a recognition of its deep roots in Sri Lankan rural life and its continued practice across generations.
The Kithul palm grows naturally in the wet and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka, from lowland forests up to around 1,500 metres in altitude. It is not commercially cultivated; each tree grows wild, flowers once over its lifetime, and is then spent — which makes the sap a genuinely finite and carefully harvested resource. Dumbara sources within this tradition and holds both FSSC 22000 food safety certification and organic certification, as stated on the product label.
In Sri Lankan kitchens, kithul jaggery is used to sweeten tea and other drinks, to prepare traditional confectionery, and to make the sweetmeats associated with the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Its flavour is more complex than refined sugar, and its solid form dissolves readily when stirred into a warm liquid or incorporated into a recipe. Each 250 g pack contains 25 servings of 10 g.
Once the inner sealed pouch is opened, the jaggery should be transferred to a clean, dry, airtight container and consumed promptly for the best result. The product is available in 250 g and 500 g packs and is labelled in English, Sinhala (කිතුල් හකුරු), and Tamil (கித்துல் கருப்பட்டி).
