Coffee seedlings under a canopy of old leaves. [Flickr: jakeliefer] With October here (and winter peeking around the corner) the harvest at local farmers' markets is leveling off. In many areas, summer CSAs are dropping off their final shares of the season. While the change in weather is making it harder to buy food from local and sustainable sources, it leaves us a perfect opportunity to celebrate Fair Trade Month....
Continue reading »
Note: Serious Eats contributor Allison Hemler is a NYC-based barista who recently traveled to Seattle to check out the internal coffee college at Starbucks HQ. This week, she'll be educating us on tidbits she picked up in class, today's focus being on the improving relationships between coffee bean farmers and roasters. Coffee farmers in Chiapas, Mexico. Photograph from tonx on Flickr As the second most traded commodity in the world after oil, coffee has acquired more frequent flier miles than any of your produce could hope for. In fact, more coffee enters the United States than any other food product. There's a clear reason why we don't have coffee trees in our backyards and why we rely on shipments from...
Continue reading »
When the UK division was warned that global sales would be down this year, they decided to go exclusively fair trade, in hopes of boosting revenue....
Continue reading »
globalexchangestore.org Several advocacy and humanitarian organizations are asking Americans to participate in "reverse trick-or-treating" this Halloween to help build awareness about inequities in the global cocoa industry and alert consumers to Fair Trade chocolate alternatives. For the second year in a row, Co-Op America, Global Exchange, and other non-profits are sending kits to consumers across the U.S. for free, asking them to join in their efforts to raise the profile of Fair Trade chocolate. The idea is for trick-or-treaters to "give back" Fair Trade chocolates at the houses they visit, "sharing a friendly Fair Trade message with [their] neighbors," according to Co-Op America. Last year, chocolate for reverse trick-or-treating 72,000 households was distributed. (Note: that's less than one-hundredth of...
Continue reading »
Confused by the morass of acronyms and catchphrases on your bag of beans? Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, Smithsonian Bird Friendly, Utz Kapeh, 4Cs, and Starbucks CAFE Practices are explained in this article by Erik Ness....
Continue reading »
