What is fair trade? The Fair Trade Federation gives this brief definition: Fair trade is an approach to business and to development based on dialogue, transparency, and respect that seeks to create greater equity in the international trading system. Fair trade businesses partner with farmers and craftspeople in developing countries who are socially and economically marginalized to find markets and customers for their goods. To learn more, visit fairtradefederation.org.
Food Co-ops have supported fair trade since 1984 when Equal Exchange first introduced fair trade coffee to the US market. There is a lot of inequity and exploitation in international trade. When we look at food, some of those items are coffee, cocoa (chocolate), sugar, vanilla, and nuts.
Some of the new fair trade items you can find at our East store:
Just Haiti is a 501c3 non-profit organization that started working with coffee farmers in Haiti in 2008. Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere, and because of recurring natural disasters many companies no longer work with Haitian producers. Just Haiti works with the most vulnerable and economically at-risk communities who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the marketplace. They use a model they call Fair Trade Plus, where they pay farmers a fair trade premium price (about 30% of retail price versus the typical 2-5% mass market price), and in addition, they also give them all the profits from US sales. This means the 100+ farmers in Haiti get 64% of the retail price on average, about double what most fair trade producers get.
Just Haiti collects coffee orders through the week and every Friday they roast coffee to fill those orders, another factor that makes this high-quality coffee stand out. This means the coffee received at the store is fresh roasted like a locally roasted coffee and not a product that was packaged weeks or months ago like most packaged coffees (that aren’t local).
Canaan Palestine supports over a 1000 marginalized artisan family farms across 43 villages living under occupation in the West Bank. These family farms have been nurturing their olive orchards for many generations. The Land of Canaan is the home to ancient olive orchards that are over 3000 years old and is often referred to as the birthplace of agriculture. Our East stores now carries their fair trade, organic, extra virgin olive oils, including olive oils infused with garlic, lemon, chili, and basil.
“Zotter Chocolates is and will remain at the top of the world-best chocolate manufacturers and by far the most innovative chocolatier of all.” ~Chocolate – the reference standard
Josef Zotter has re-invented chocolate: Hand-scooped Chocolates are basically giant bonbons. Featuring wonderful flavor combinations, hand-scooped chocolates are filled chocolate miracles consisting of several layers, brushed onto long lanes – one on top of the other – by hand.
“Not unlike wine, each cacao variety has its own very distinct flavor, shaped by the terroir of its growing region. Sometimes that flavor is nutty, sometimes it has more of a flowery bouquet like the Ecuadorian beans or more citrus notes like the beans from Madagascar.” ~Zotter
Zotter mainly buys cacao in Latin America, the cradle of cacao. They get their fine cacao from countries like Peru, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Guatemala, Brazil, Belize, the Dominican Republic, Madagascar, Togo, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda.
Huuuge shout out to our East Store Assistant Manager, Dave Debikey, for being a champion of bringing in more fair trade products! Dave was the Store Manager at the Bloomington Global Gifts for 13 years and their Purchasing Manager for a number of years, and we are grateful to have Dave on our team! Thank you, Dave, for continuing to be an advocate for Fair Trade products and growing our selection of fairly traded and healthful products, produced with care for the land, animals, and future generations!
