Fairtrade Fortnight
We're now halfway through Fairtrade Fortnight, an annual chance to celebrate the opportunities we have to buy fairly. There are great products available from a range of retailers, some of which (like coffee and tea) you'll be very familiar with, and others which are a bit more unusual. For some items it's easy to spot if they are fair trade - you can look for the Fairtrade logo when you're in the supermarket. For others, like a lot of the products we stock, it's more complicated. You may well ask why we don't insist that all of our products carry the Fairtrade logo, and we've tried to answer that here.For us, the key criteria is transparency. The people you buy from should be open and honest about where their products come from, and should be able to answer questions you have about how the people who created them are remunerated and treated. We have a detailed list of standards we apply to the products we buy, and also have a questionnaire we send to all prospective suppliers.
We like to think this is going "beyond the logo" and building up a genuine, ongoing relationship with the artisans and craftspeople we are buying from. We have already visited some of our suppliers in person in Mexico and hope to meet more over the year ahead as time allows. Coming soon we have more exclusive lines from Argentina, Colombia and India. If you have any questions about any of the products we stock, please get in touch and we can tell you all we know.
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