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Alternative Grounds
Coffee sellers and drinkers like the idea of fair trade coffee, but don't always put their money where their mouths are
By: Carole Pearson
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Canadians drink 15 billion cups of coffee a year and spend $600 million a year on coffee for at-home consumption. From a regular cup of Joe to iced lattes, coffee sold via the food service sector produces revenue of between $2.2 and $2.5 billion. |
June 9/00 - Fair trade coffee should be a hot seller. It pushes all the right buttons in our social conscience. It gives Third World farmers a better price for their crops, promotes sustainable agricultural practices and is less harmful to the environment. It's also an alternative to the big multinational coffee companies and tunes into the populist movement opposing corporate globalization. So why isn't fair trade coffee more readily available? Why does it seem to be a hard sell?
Canadians drink 15 billion cups of coffee a year. Coffee Association of Canada president Sandy McAlpine says Canadians spend $600 million a year on coffee for at-home consumption. From a regular cup of Joe to iced lattes, coffee sold via the food service sector produces revenue of between $2.2 and $2.5 billion.
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Women at Las Lajas cooperative in El Salvador pick and sort fair trade coffee beans |
TransFair Canada (formerly Fair TradeMark Canada), a non-profit organization which licenses fair trade products, says studies show 60 to 80 per cent of consumers say they will pay extra for fair trade goods. When given the opportunity, one to five per cent of people will actually do so. This is the case in Europe where fair trade coffee has captured a niche of up to five per cent of the market with 130 brands of fair trade coffee sold in 35,000 supermarkets.
One group trying to change this is the Vancouver Fair Trade Coffee Network (VFTCN) - a group of volunteers trying to improve the availability of fair trade coffee in their community. Tony Kuczma says he and another member visited nearly 60 coffee shops, cafes and restaurants in the past year.
"Owners and managers are usually sympathetic but they then proceed to present a good number of reasons why they can't take it on," he says. "Some are locked into contracts with other suppliers and can't break the contract. Some say they have a good relationship with their supplier and don't want to endanger it. Others are worried about risk. They're unsure of the demand and if it's going to sell."
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Grocery stores either "won't carry the product or won't do it in the manner that it should be done. You need to have a proper bin display and have information available about the product." |
Larry Reid is a director of TransFair Canada who also belongs to the VFTCN. He says the group has refocused its efforts after concluding "a wholesaler won't carry fair trade coffee if one small coffee shop says they'll buy ten pounds a week. But if a bank buys coffee for all its branches - they're the ones that will buy enough to make wholesalers consider taking on fair trade coffee."
This was the result at Pistol and Burnes, a Vancouver-area roaster and wholesaler that supplies regular coffee to stores, offices and hotels. Owner Roy Hardy says, "Three years ago, one of our clients asked us to get them fair trade coffee. I didn't know anything about fair trade coffee so I did some research." Hardy now avidly supports the fair trade system and his company markets its own line of fair trade coffee.
But getting this product on grocery shelves has been a problem. Hardy says grocery stores either "won't carry the product or won't do it in the manner that it should be done. You need to have a proper bin display and have information available about the product." Hardy has convinced some smaller independently owned stores to stock his coffee but there is no information posted about fair trade. He says if the owners were "really keen," they would be promoting this product more.
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Last year, 75,800 kilograms of certified fair trade beans were roasted in Canada, more than double the amount from the previous year. But compared with the 130 million kilograms of regular unprocessed coffee imported in 1998, this is just a drop in the bucket - or coffee pot. |
It's a highly competitive market. Hardy says, "The big guys control the space and don't want us in there." According to Derek Zarislake, founder and co-president of Merchants of Green Coffee, which imports fair trade coffee beans, "The control of imports and the places where most people purchase their coffee is dominated by multinationals." Ninety per cent of the coffee sold in Canada comes from Kraft, Nestle and Proctor & Gamble."
These giant corporations have the money to buy their way onto supermarket shelves. It is a common practice in the grocery store industry to charge companies for shelf space. A company can be expected to pay "slotting allowances" ranging from five to ten thousand dollars per product line per store to get onto the shelves. Zarislake says, "There's no way a fair trade company can afford to pay for shelf space."
Fair trade coffee sellers can't afford big advertising budgets, either. Both Hardy and Zarislake complain about the lack of advertising about fair trade coffee but there are signs the message is getting out. TransFair Canada says last year, 75,800 kilograms of certified fair trade beans were roasted in Canada, more than double the amount from the previous year. But compared with the 130 million kilograms of regular unprocessed coffee imported in 1998, this is just a drop in the bucket - or coffee pot. To make fair trade coffee more readily available, Zarislake says, "The first step is getting people aware of fair trade coffee and have them asking for it."
Get More/Do More
Fair Trade online - www.web.net/fairtrade.
Check out The Merchants of Green Coffee - www.merchant.org.
More on fair trade coffee:
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