An Ivorian agricultural worker picks cocoa pods
Playing by the rules
Published: 01 October, 2009
The Fairtrade label is finally making inroads into mainstream consumer products in the UK, despite a recession hitting spending.
It is apparently customary for Starbucks’ employees to begin their meetings with a coffee tasting, an American corporate bonding ritual that has carried across the Atlantic into the company’s new UK headquarters in Chiswick, West London.
2009 has not been an overwhelmingly positive one for Starbucks UK. The company announced in August that it will be selling off more than 30 of its British stores, including several in the caffeine-addicted, if oversaturated, City of London, due to shrinking consumer demand.
The pattern has been repeated elsewhere in the world, although Starbucks, with its signature green mermaid logo, still has more than 15,000 outlets in 44 countries. Admired and derided in equal measures for its brand’s global expansion, Starbucks has always maintained that it is commited to responsible business, and faced with a recession cutting into its profit margins, the company has decided to further extend its ethical sourcing practices, including a commitment to source all of its espresso used in UK stores under Fairtrade guidelines.
This espresso blend will not be sourced from the company’s network in East Africa, but Starbucks, working with the Fairtrade Foundation, which guarantees that smallholder farmers receive a “social premium” for their products, is trying to extend the Fairtrade mark into the region, starting with Rwanda. Making this kind of investment in a period of uncertainty seems counterintuitive, but Darcy Willson-Rymer, managing director of Starbucks UK, believes that it will pay off. “It wasn’t a difficult decision at all,” he says. “It comes back to how do want to do business and how you want consumers to be talking about your company when you come our of the recession.”
Starbucks has, Mr Willson-Rymer explains, developed its own system of certification – Coffee And Farmer Equity, or “Cafe” practices, which define the social and ethical standards under which coffee should be purchased. Last year around 65 percent of the firm’s coffee was bought using these guidelines. However, this in-house measure has limited currency amongst consumers.
“I think Fairtrade allows us to tell the story in a much more simple way,” Mr Willson-Rymer says. “It’s all very well to talk about Cafe practices, but if you say to a customer, ‘this is 100 percent Fairtrade,’ they know what that is.”
Consumer research does show that recognition of the Fairtrade brand is high in the UK, at around 70 percent, but the mark has spent years as a niche product, often attached to relatively high-priced items aimed at comparatively wealthy, ethically aware customers. From a low base, sales of Fairtrade products have grown on around 40 percent per year, according to Fairtrade UK’s director, Harriet Lamb. However, the past year has seen it emerge into the mainstream, with mass retailer Sainsbury’s converting a number of products, including its bananas, to Fairtrade, another retailer, the Co-op, moving its own brand tea onto the mark, and Cadbury, a leading confectionary maker, will carry the mark on its bestselling ‘Dairy Milk’ chocolate bar, having agreed to source the required cocoa using Fairtrade methods.
