Support Fair Trade coffee... Buy your coffee from certain expresso machines (Saeco)!

[cascadiance]

Those of you who have to go indulge at Starbucks from time to time and moan because they don't have their Fair Trade certified coffee being served that day may have another option to be a conscientious coffee drinker, and this could also help many workplaces too that workers want to have expresso machines and want to also be conscientious...

I found out something kind of cool yesterday where I'd not expected to.

A few weeks ago, as many of you here on DU also did, I'd tuned into Link TV and a documentary called "Birdsong and Coffee", which talked about how the big middlemen coffee corporations, Maxwell House, Folgers, etc. are all still charging us very high prices for the world's second biggest commodity business next to oil (coffee) when selling us coffee, but are paying next to nothing to the producers of coffee beans in Latin America, forcing that industry into decline down there for people that feel forced to sell to those companies with less quality product, screwing up the environment, etc. The way producers are fighting back is setting up places to roast and distribute their own coffee beans and do things like shade grown (keeping the forest trees down there that maintain the local environment and habitat as well as quality of the coffee instead of cutting them down to increase yields, etc.), bypassing these companies and selling directly to people here in the states. If you see labels on your coffee that say "Fair Trade Certified", that's a stamp of approval that you are buying direct from them, giving people more money down south so that they can have a higher standard of living and send their kids to school, keep the coffee industry healthy, and basically protect our jobs by providing less fodder of cheap labor down there to outsource to by buying fair trade coffee instead of Maxwell House, etc. here.

Anyway, places like Starbucks are a mixed bag now if you're buying coffee on the fly. You can get Fair Trade certified coffee at Starbucks (they are test marketing this now with an Ethiopian blend) but they only have one or two blends that are this, and therefore when you're trying to just get a cup of an expresso drink or one of the three brands they are serving that day, it is most likely not fair trade certified coffee that they will serve you directly there.

When the place I worked at here in San Diego brought in some Saeco machines to our office to give us free coffee that would serve up things like Lattes and Cappucinos from a machine so that we wouldn't have to go to Starbucks for expresso drinks, I was skeptical whether they had any fair trade coffee at all, and was for a while planning on trying to organize something internally at the company, which is also in other cities, to try and challenge the company to make sure they buy fair trade certified coffee for employees, even if we had to get a fund that employees could donate to to help with this (since the difference in price is pretty small).

Yesterday, I happened to be in our kitchen when the guy that came out and serviced these Saeco machines came in to refill it with coffee, etc. I asked him if they served fair trade coffee. He said he didn't know and wasn't really aware of that distinction. We pulled out the bag that he had his coffee beans in to put into our machine, and it was the Starbucks branded Kirkland coffee beans that he bought from Costco. And low and behold there was a "Fair Trade" certified label on it. Yay! I then knew that I was just going to get coffee from his machine from that point forward (not even out of the coffee bags that are in our office for the other coffee machines). I told him that him using these beans would be another good selling point for other offices and business around here. Probably should have told him that he should get a label to put on his machine that it sells "Fair Trade" certified coffee, so that his pay vending machines that are in other places around here could also alert the conscientious consumer that his stuff was better to the coffee producers than stopping at Starbucks. He seemed happy to find out something new about his product, and I hope that he champions that back at the folks that are all selling this service as a potential business advantage to them, and also an advantage to us the consumer to give us a choice that can help us make a difference!

Look around for these machines where you are (I know that they have one at my dentist locally too here) and I've seen them at other places. Perhaps the more of us that buy from them and pass back to them that we like that they serve Fair Trade certified coffee will increase their business and put more pressure on Starbucks to offer the same. I don't know if this is a nationwide decision or just his local decision to buy beans from Costco, but if it makes cost sense purely economically for him to do so, let's communicate back to the company that from a competitive and moral standpoint, its also a very good thing to get these coffee beans wholesale nationwide from costco (or similar outlets with Fair Trade Certified coffee) and to post labels on all of their machines nationwide.

Just one more way we can take some of the money back away from the big corporations that are trying to grab it all from us as middlemen with oligopoly power and give it back to the rest of us and help the working man! I think the good thing sort of happened by accident here, but let's not let that fall through the cracks. Let's make it permanent and a good thing for the consumers and the coffee producers of the world!

[Sticky]

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