The fight for Fairtrade

The hallmark of a pirate is an ability to challenge the mainstream, and eventually, change it for the better.

In that respect, Traidcraft are original pirates. Founded in 1979, they introduced the first fair trade tea, coffee and sugar to the UK, and in 1992, co-founded the Fairtrade Foundation. The mission was simple but radical: make capitalism fair.

For four decades, they have successfully championed the need for just and sustainable international trade, alongside their sister charity, Traidcraft Exchange, watching as the mainstream caught on.

Then in 2018, everything turned on its head. The economic climate and increasing competition from large online retailers pushed Traidcraft to breaking point. With the company in crisis and all the staff at risk of redundancy, they faced a choice. Go pirate, or go under.

Since then Traidcraft have since been on a journey to become pirates, lead by CEO Robin Roth and Jude Allen, Traidcraft’s Commercial Sales Executive. Lots of rules to rewrite, and quickly, but to figure out how, they needed to ensure they all understood why. They needed to understand what it was they were fighting for.

“Unfortunately, it is harder to be passionate about fair trade when even the most frequently boycotted and despised food multi-nationals have their token range of ethical products in the shelves.  And in any case, what really is fair trade nowadays? What exactly are we fighting for? Ask 10 different people and you will get the proverbial 20 different answers.”

We began challenging ourselves. Where is our passion? What will we fight for in order to achieve any of this? We found that there were exactly three things we agreed on, which, given that there are 12 of us, came as a bit of a surprise.” 

Traidcraft committed to holding quarterly ‘Battle Line meetings’ to hold each other accountable to their goals and return Be More Pirate as a ‘lesson plan’, but even with a plan in place, they were fighting the tension between keeping the wheels churning and moving on these bigger ambitions.  

In May 2019, we ran a workshop with the team to help them push their ambition further. The result was that they came up with a new story that would allow Traidcraft to reclaim its place as pirates at the edges of the map and would provide the momentum they needed. The new mission showed that Traidcraft was not only worth saving, it was going to do something historic again.

The full Traidcraft story is documented in our new book, “How to: Be More Pirate.”

We are now seeing the fruits of their new direction: a bolder Traidcraft that is shouting loudly about what it really means to be fair trade. Early in 2020 they launched the first ever ‘transparency coffee’ to bring transparency back to the fairtrade process.

Here, we’re breaking all the rules and publishing publicly (on the front of the packet, for all to see!) exactly how much farmers are paid, how much goes into shipping, roasting and packing and how much profit we make. This makes our coffee, to our knowledge, the first coffee in the world to do this. Yes, this could be seen as radical and revolutionary, however, it’s simply real fair trade in its purest form, as it was intended to be. We wonder, how many companies would treat you the same way?