Yesterday I highlighted some high-profile initiatives announced last week by specialty roasters in the United States. The Keurig Green Mountain water stewardship work, in my mind, is particularly impressive for the degree to which it is embedded in the company’s core business: it sees water as both central to its business model and as a […]
Water seemed to be everywhere in the coffee news last week, and the biggest headlines were reserved for TOMS, which is expanding from shoes and fashion accessories into specialty coffee, and bringing its One-for-One approach with it: for each bag of coffee it sells, TOMS will deliver a week of water to a person in […]
For the second year in a row, the most popular posts to the CRS Coffeelands Blog were related to our coverage of changes in the Fair Trade system: posts on Fair Trade for All took seven of the 10 top spots for 2012. Rounding out the top 10 were posts on water resource management and […]
As I reflect more on The Nation’s excellent article on the split in the Fair Trade movement, I am reminded of a product review by Ritual Coffee, the iconic San Francisco roaster, that included this passage: “Did we once tell you that the Hario Hand Mills were the best hand grinders available? Yes. Are we […]
Empowerment is a popular term in the fields of international development and Fair Trade. It has been mentioned many times in the current debate over changes to the Fair Trade system — including several times on this blog — by people who are both for FT4All and against it: Ed Canty buys Fair Trade Certified […]
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters became the world’s largest Fair Trade coffee buyer in 2010, when it purchased over 26 million pounds of Fair Trade Certified coffee. The person responsible for all those purchases is Ed Canty, the company’s certified coffee buyer. But Ed isn’t only in charge of Fair Trade coffee buying for GMCR. He […]
The manager of a Fair Trade coffee cooperative in Central America told me recently that Fair Trade USA’s decision to make estates and independent smallholder farmers eligible for Fair Trade Certification is creating another version of Fair Trade — one that has very little to do with his idea of what Fair Trade is all […]
Today, a roll call of recent developments at origin worthy of note: industry efforts to increase and better measure impact.
Last September, Fair Trade USA issued two controversial announcements: one about its decision to withdraw from Fairtrade International, the global Fair Trade Certifier formerly known as FLO, and another launching its Fair Trade for All initiative, which rewrites the rules of Fair Trade and opens the U.S. Fair Trade market to coffee estates. In the […]
In this article in the current issue of Roast Magazine, Fair Trade USA CEO Paul Rice again expresses optimism about the future of Fair Trade Certification in the United States. Before you panic, let me say this is not another post about Fair Trade for All. At least, it is mostly not. Mostly, it is […]
