Ben & Jerry’s

Fair Trade: Even in tough times, growing fast

September 29, 2011

The proliferation of labels and claims at the grocery store can befuddle even the most conscientious consumer. What to buy? Organic produce? Locally grown vegetables? MSC-certified fish? Fair Trade coffee or chocolate?

Paul Rice, the president and CEO of Fair Trade USA, isn’t worried by the clutter. All the labels, he says, reflect a big trend–the growing appetite of food shoppers for  more “transparency and traceability.”

Says Rice: “Consumers want to know where their stuff is coming from. They want to know if it’s safe. They want to know if it’s healthy. They want to know what the impact is on the environment.”

“Consumers are increasingly using their purchasing decisions to express their values,” he says.

Of course, we’ve been hearing for decades that consumers are voting with their dollars; the trouble is, too many of us vote for crap too much of the time. But–and this is important–there’s good news when it comes to Fair Trade: Despite the sluggish US economy, it’s growing fast.

Sales of Fair Trade Certified products at mainstream grocery stores grew by 87 percent in the second quarter of 2011 over the previous quarter, according to recent data from  SPINS, which tracks the natural foods industry. Sales in the specialty and gourmet channels grew by 32 percent, for an overall growth rate of 63 percent.

What’s more, the range of products that are Fair Trade certified is expanding rapidly to include not just coffee, tea, cocoa and bananas, all which are grown in the tropics, but also sugar, flowers, honey, herbs and spices, beans and grains, wine and, most recently, apparel and sports equipment.

[Disclosure: After I'd begun writing this story, the people at Fair Trade USA, which is the leading independent certifier of Fair Trade products in the U.S., sent me a basket of goodies that included coffee, tea, chocolate bars, honey, Honest Cocoa Nova, Pink Guava Drizzle and a soccer ball. Let me know, please, if you've got a great recipe that calls for Pink Guava Drizzle.]

I spoke via Skype the other day with Paul Rice and Robert Grgrurev, a brand manager at Green & Black’s Organic chocolate which is going 100% Fair Trade, to learn more about Fair Trade and its impact. [click to continue…]

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Chilling with Ben & Jerry

October 22, 2008

When I think about the causes of climate change, coal-fired power plants and SUVs come to mind. But refrigerants matter, too. Not the refrigerator in your kitchen–it’s unlikely to be emitting greenhouse gases–but the chemical refrigeratants known as HFCs and HCFCs in your car’s air conditioner, commercial coolers and industrial freezers can all escape and cause problems, particularly when they are manufactured or improperly thrown away.

This is one of those important, complicated, technical and potentially dull stories that I try to tackle from time to time, in this case in today’s Sustainability column. The issue got my attention when Ben & Jerry’s and Greenpeace announced that they were able to get permission from the U.S. EPA to introduce what they call a “cleaner, greener” refrigerator into the U.S. (Turns out EPA was an obstacle to cleaning up the refrigerator biz.) Some other big companies, including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have been working on the problem, too. Let’s hope they succeed so the rest of us don’t have to worry about it.

Here’s how the column begins:

No one wants melting ice cream. Nor do we want melting polar ice caps. The trouble is, keeping our ice cream cold warms the planet because powerful greenhouse gases are used in most refrigerators and freezers in the U.S.

That’s why environmentalists at Greenpeace have been working with some of the world’s biggest food makers – among them Coca-Cola, McDonald’s and Unilever – to deploy refrigerators in supermarkets and convenience stores that are free of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are potent greenhouse gases.

Just last month, Ben & Jerry’s, the Vermont-based ice cream maker owned by Unilever, announced plans to roll out the country’s first HFC-free freezers.

“A company can be responsible in terms of the environment, it can be proactive in terms of solving problems, and it can make money at the same time,” said company co-founder Ben Cohen when he introduced the freezers at an ice-cream store in Washington, D.C. “That’s what we should expect from all corporations in this country.”

You can read the rest of the column here.

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