You have bean Verified

14 06 2008
This post is only included in the archives to show how wrong I was about Fair Trade Coffee. Verification is very subjective and the term fair trade is poorly used term by marketers. I hope to investigate more in the coming months.

You don’t need verification to be classified as fair trade or organic, but it can help. If you just put fair trade on your roast, without giving any information about where the roast is from or who has farmed it, then it is much like lying on your resume.

“Verified” gives you that little bit of information to say “OK, a third party has checked into this and what they say is true.” A lot of the confusion comes from fair trade being closely associated with organic. Although the two are usually marketed together it doesn’t mean that what is a fair trade roast is automatically organic and what is organic is automatically fair trade. Fair trade certification doesn’t even measure quality or taste all it does is

Take Starbucks for example, it says it has a fair trade roast, but only by its own accord, and the information is very limited to the consumer. It gives you almost no knowledge about what you’re drinking, so their is no paper trail about this coffee, the plantation, or the process the farmers uses.

Also, some roasters do not support third party verification because it takes money away from the farmer.

An example is Victrola. Which doesn’t have any third party verification, but does participate in the Cup of Excellence Competition. Cup of Excellence celebrates the achievements the farmer has made in cultivating the best bean using the best practises and then it is auction off to the highest bidder.

What a lot of educated roasters do is direct trade coffee, a number of them also participate in the Cup of Excellence as well, but what these roasters do is provide information about who it purchases from, who the owner of the farm is and usually pictures of the plantation and how the crop was picked. What these two roasters and many others do is called direct trade coffee 49th Parallel affectionately calls its relationship coffee.

It is not an exact science nor is it fool proof and is a some what controversial subject. But if you have an educated roaster and an educated barista, you will get an educated consumer.

Amendment April 09 :

The Fair / Direct Trade Coffee List has been discontinued until a better way of listing roasters is found.

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Categories : Rant