By the time our coffee arrives in your cup, it has been on a long journey, from farm to mill, from origin to roaster, and ultimately into your hands. At Starbucks, we help oversee a lot of this process, because it’s important to know not only how the coffee’s being handled from a quality standpoint, but also to know how much the farmer is being paid. These two factors – quality and what we call “economic transparency,” – are the two most important factors we consider before making a coffee purchasing decision.
Our own verification process, C.A.F.E Practices, has measures for these factors, but another process does too, one that I know you’ve heard about, as we’ve received thousands of requests and comments about it here: Fair Trade Certified™ coffee.
Make ALL of your beans FAIR TRADE and 100% organic
Fair trade coffee
Really Fair
Because we want to assure you that we are hearing you – and because it’s good for quality and small-scale farmers – we just announced a groundbreaking new initiative with our friends in the Fair Trade movement, TransFair USA and the Fair Trade Labeling Organizations International (FLO). Working with them, we will double our Fair Trade Certified™ coffee purchases to 40 million pounds in 2009. This makes Starbucks the single largest purchaser of Fair Trade Certified™ coffee in the world, and brings you more assurance that our coffee is ethically sourced.
It’s important to know that as part of our Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ commitments, we have a goal that 100 percent of our coffee will be ethically sourced by 2015. We’re doing pretty well so far, at 65 percent. This increase in Fair Trade Certified™ coffee will help, because we are starting down the road to integrating the verification process for C.A.F.E. Practices and Fair Trade Certified™ so that they both meet our Starbucks™ Shared Planet™ guidelines for ethically sourced coffee.
Please let us know how you think we’re doing in the area of ethically sourced coffee, what you think of this announcement, and ideas you have for continual improvement. By working together, we can accomplish so much more for our own communities at home and our coffee farmers' around the world.
Dub Hay,
svp coffee and global procurement