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I'm on South Street in Philadelphia, outside Whole Foods.
I'm out of coffee at home. I'm gonna go inside, see what type of beans they have.
When you go to buy coffee, you've probably noticed all the little seals, insignia, and labels on the packaging, as our reporter Andrew Stelzer did.
The Whole Food brand bags have several different seeming certification labels.
USDA Organic is on most of them. Then there's a Fairtrade certified rectangle, and then there's another circle that says whole foods market sourced for good.
The label Fair Trade has become commonplace on packages of chocolate, honey, and especially coffee bags.
But what does fair trade actually mean? Trying to figure out who picks these beans, how they're treated.
Whether they're ethically sourced is a tricky proposition.
Where did all these labels come from? When did they begin to appear on coffee bags?
And when did the coffee aisle get so big?
The first Fairtrade label appeared in 1988, but the human network that birthed that label had already been building for decades.
Activists in the Global North and food producers in the Global South had working relationships.
They were searching for ways to leverage those cross-border ties and improve the lives of the people who worked the hardest, but often got paid the least.
Today on Proof from America's Test Kitchen.
How coffee growers, revolutionaries, and food pioneers forged a historic shift in the global coffee industry.
I'm Jack Bishop. Stay tuned. Hey, Proof listeners, I don't know about you, but I cannot wait to get outside now that grilling season is here.
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Yeah, Film Vault. We are one of the original film podcasts.
That can't be true. There was like two other film podcasts when we began, Brian.
How long have we been doing this show? You and I first sat down and did a version of this show over 20 years ago.
My God. There is shtick, but it's very little shtick.
We finish each other's... Sandwiches? Close enough.
Was that a joke on a movie? That's from Frozen.
Oh, it is. Pretty bad. Oh, look at you.
I don't want to be like quoting Frozen on this promo.
Peek behind the curtain. Anderson is like the frozen guy.
He'll constantly reference animated films, family films, and I'm more the edgy indie guy.
We do have the trophy thing going on where Brian does like the big Hollywood sexy summer movies.
I'm always looking for like the hidden gems.
Two episodes each week. week one we are review movies and the first episode the second one top five time top five different top five every week Movies that made you cry.
Worst movie accents. Most disturbing movies.
All right, The Film Blog. Check it out wherever you find podcasts.
That's right. The film vault's going on 20 plus years.
Reporter Andrew Stelzer has the story. I've been covering activist movements, mostly in the United States, since the early 2000s.
And as a reporter, it's important to know the history of your beat.
So since I moved to Philadelphia a couple of years ago, I've been trying to read up on how the city came to be what it is.
Philly has a long reputation as a sanctuary for immigrants, and a major rush of Central American migration came in the 1970s and 80s. when refugees were fleeing a number of armed conflicts and civil wars abroad.
Activists here and in other North American cities worked hard on a campaign opposing U.S. intervention in those conflicts.
And while they didn't succeed in stopping those wars, it turns out the networks and relationships they formed helped spark the fair trade coffee movement into formal existence.
I wanted to know how that happened. And here in Philly, most roads related to food and activism eventually lead to a woman named Judy Wicks.
Often described as a pioneer of the local food movement, Judy Wicks grew up in rural western Pennsylvania, in a tiny town outside Pittsburgh called Ingimar.
Well, when I was a child, that was back in the 40s and 50s, It was an America that feels right out of a storybook.
Kids in my grade school, for instance, were the kids of farmers, the pig farmers, the Steigerwalds, I remember.
They were pig farmers. So my mother and grandmother had a relationship with a butcher in our town, and he would ask them, well, how was that steak last Saturday night?
Because he knew what farm it came from and wanted to... check on the quality and that kind of thing.
Judy said pretty much everyone knew where their food came from.
At that time, there wasn't much of an option to do otherwise.
What I remember about food is going up in the garden and picking tomatoes for dinner that night or green beans or corn, squash.
I remember the seasons of things like my grandmother would always make fresh fruit pies as they came of the season.
First was the rhubarb and then the strawberries and then you know, the peaches and so on throughout the season and ending with pumpkin.
It all sounds so down home and healthy and delicious.
But when I asked Judy about her memories of coffee, it was more about marketing, not so much about family and friends.
I remember my mother's coffee percolator in the TV ads, like for Maxwell House or something, the sound of the percolator on the ads.
This is the coffee pot at work. Listen to it perk.
You can almost smell the coffee because I love the sound of the percolator.
And that reminds me of my childhood, just hearing the coffee percolator perking away.
Maxwell House is good to the last drop. It tastes as good as it smells every time.
Maxwell House. My parents both had morning cups of coffee.
I certainly had no interest in it at the time.
And I certainly knew nothing about fair trade or any of that because I
Maxwell House was really all there was. Maxwell House began battling Folgers for US market dominance in the late 1800s.
The rivalry helped popularize ground coffee, and most ad campaigns focused on flavor or innovative preparation techniques.
The percolator was followed by the espresso machine.
Then instant coffee exploded in popularity during World War I. as a way to ship coffee to soldiers on the front in Europe.
But throughout the waves of technological change, for the most part, coffee was just coffee.
Despite its status as one of the world's most traded commodities, the general public didn't know very much about where it came from.
This 1954 promotional film was a rare effort to educate consumers.
We Americans know what we like, and we really do like coffee.
Did I say like? Well we use more than three billion pounds of coffee every year.
Where does it all come from? mostly from South America.
So let's fly down and get the story firsthand.
Through the first half of the 20th century, the lion's share of coffee in the US came from plantations in Brazil.
Later, other parts of Latin America began large-scale production.
Many of the remote villages depend upon the plantations for their existence.
Life is pretty much the same as it has been for generations.
Today, of course, each village has its own schoolhouse and the standard of living is immeasurably higher with increased knowledge.
Naturally, the education of its youngsters includes learning all about coffee at an early age.
If you didn't catch that, it was more or less a description of training school-age kids to tend the fields.
The coffee trade was, and still is, brutal for the vast majority of workers.
If you want to give a sense of the kind of injustices that are embedded every day in global coffee.
The International Labour Organization did some research on a handful of coffee countries just a few years back.
Gavin Friedle is a professor of political science and global development studies at St.
Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
He's written two books about coffee, one specific to fair trade.
And out of that research, they found that 91% of the coffee workers in Indonesia were not earning the minimum wage.
And 85% of the small coffee farmers in Indonesia weren't earning a minimum wage.
The numbers in Costa Rica, Vietnam, and India were somewhat better than Indonesia in that 2020 study.
But still, it found many workers and farmers were paid less than their country's minimum wage.
And that minimum wage is not a living wage.
Calculations for living wages are usually higher than minimum wages.
In 1963, the United Nations created the International Coffee Organization, to help regulate global coffee prices and stabilize business for producers.
But Friedle says those benefits never trickle down to the people picking the beans.
That international coffee agreement did create higher prices, but it didn't have much influence on who got that higher price.
So you could be a giant plantation in Guatemala or Brazil and treat your workers very poorly and you still get the higher price.
But then came the 1960s and 70s, a time of transformation.
Thousands of demonstrators opposed to the Vietnam War assembled in the nation's capital for a mass protest.
For the most part orderly, minor scuffles did occur between the demonstrators... While civil rights and the war in Vietnam may have taken center stage, There was an entire society to revamp and replace.
Some of the less documented changes came in the years after Woodstock and Richard Nixon.
Those who had grown up in the anti-war movement were working their way into adulthood and searching for ways to remake the world.
Starting their own small businesses became one of the avenues they took.
This is West Philly, University of Pennsylvania.
I'm about to turn the corner onto Sansom Street, which looked pretty different 50 plus years ago when Judy Wicks Arrived.
And there's Judy. In the 1970s, Judy Wicks was an idealistic 20-something, living and working in West Philadelphia and soaking in the counterculture vibes.
This neighborhood is sometimes known as Philly's Left Bank, both for its location on the west side of the Schuylkill River and the community's political leanings.
This very block of Sansom Street became the center of Judy Wick's world.
It's where she evolved from a local foods restaurateur to entrepreneur into an international fair trade coffee facilitator.
I moved here in, let's see, 1972. At the time, I was leaving my first business that I owned with my husband because I was getting a divorce from my husband. and needed to get a quick part-time job.
A quick historical side note. That business Judy started with her ex-husband was a secondhand shop that eventually became the multinational chain Urban Outfitters.
Whoa. Okay, back to Sansom Street, 1972.
So I came to the block to take a job as a waitress at a restaurant called La Terrasse.
And where was that? Where are we looking?
That was right there on the corner of Moravian Street and Sansom Street.
Judy quickly worked her way up to general manager at the La Terrasse restaurant, and the way they sourced ingredients was pretty unusual for the time.
It was started by a fellow who was inspired when he was in France.
He brought back a French chef with him when he first started the restaurant.
And the French had the tradition of going to the market every morning to get the food for a restaurant.
The chef would go himself to pick out the best products.
And so we did that. I would go to the market with the chef and we would drive a van down there and we would pick out the vegetables and the meats and all that stuff and put them in the van to take them back.
Even though some of those ingredients were actually flown into the Philadelphia area, Judy saw that just as in her childhood hometown of Ingomar, human relationships could be an important part of food systems.
And after 10 years at La Terrasse, she decided to start her own business a few doors down in 1983.
She called it the White Dog Cafe. It began as a takeout coffee and muffin shop, but soon grew into a full-on sit-down restaurant.
Right off the bat, we wanted to buy from local farmers.
And so there was a restaurant in in Philadelphia that was known for buying from farmers, there was only one.
And so I stole their chef. That chef was named Elisa Green.
There was no local food system that I was aware of, but when I brought the chef onboard, she had a relationship with a family farm.
So that really put us on the map because she was a fabulous chef.
Unbeknownst to Judy, her new chef had briefly cooked in Alice Waters' kitchen at Chez Panisse in Berkeley.
Chez Panisse is seen as the cradle of California cuisine and Waters, the creator of farm-to-table dining in the United States.
So, the seeds of the local food movement that had been planted in California were now spreading to West Philly.
And Judy's sensibility fit right in with that ethos.
I wasn't a chef myself, but I appreciated my work. and my grandmother's cooking so much that I named dishes after them.
Like we had Betty's beef kebabs. That was my mother's dish.
And then we had Brother John's chicken kebab.
And then we had Nana's strawberry pie, which was my grandmother's strawberry pie recipe.
So everything was really about my family's cooking because that's what I knew.
The White Dog Cafe was a hit. But as time went on, Judy realized that to truly support local farmers, one restaurant wouldn't be enough.
Rather than hoard her food sources as a trade secret, Judy would share them so that other restaurants could buy from the same suppliers.
It's a supply and demand kind of thing, like the farmers aren't going to grow it if there's not a market to buy it.
So it's like a symbiotic relationship between local farmers and local restaurateurs.
The more we bought from farmers, the more farmers grew things and the more they grew.
And they would actually ask the chefs, you know, what do you want us to grow?
Like radicchio? you know, what is it that you want?
And so as things became fashionable on the West Coast, East Coast chefs would request these things from our farmers. it really was in my opinion restaurants that made the local food movement happen Judy wasn't an activist out in the streets chanting for change.
She was doing change every day through her work.
She chose to prioritize the growth of the entire local food system, not just her own personal financial success.
She was building community and strengthening the local food economy in a way that came instinctively to her.
But there were still a few crucial things that couldn't be sourced anywhere near Philly.
An obvious one was coffee. In a neighborhood full of college students, coffee was a constant presence.
And as the thriving White Dog Cafe expanded, Judy added a dedicated coffee shop next door.
I remember getting coffee from a corporation that supplied the coffee machines, that the coffee machines were owned by the coffee company.
There was maybe two large companies that you choose from.
Judy wanted to do better for her customers and her own conscience, but she hadn't figured out how.
History would soon bring her an answer. After the break, how activists opposing U.S. intervention in Central America look to coffee beans as a lever of justice.
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And now back to our story. Central America is a region of great importance to the United States.
It's at our doorstep. And it's become the stage for a bold attempt by the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Nicaragua to install communism by force throughout the hemisphere.
In the early 1980s, the Cold War was going strong, and leftist groups were battling oppressive governments throughout Central America.
In Nicaragua, Sandinista revolutionaries had overthrown a dictator named Anastasio Somoza.
After taking power, the Sandinistas began redistributing land and investing in healthcare and education for the largely poor population.
But President Reagan saw the socialist transformation as part of a larger communist threat.
The Soviets and Sandinistas must not be permitted to crush freedom in Central America and threaten our own security on our own doorstep.
In response, the CIA began funding and training a counter-revolutionary group known as the Contras.
It was an amazing experience to see what Nicaragua was doing.
And then Reagan came to power and started trying to undo all of that.
David Funkhauser was part of a generation of activists who had watched the failure of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
He didn't want to see the same thing happen again in Central America.
He knew the Sandinistas weren't perfect, they were committing human rights abuses of their own, But he was on the side of the people, fighting to decide their own destiny, not being pushed around by foreign powers.
So there was the Contra War in Nicaragua, there was the war in El Salvador, there was Of course, a lot of violence in Honduras and Guatemala that goes back to many, many decades.
And in all of these, the US was primarily involved.
There were U.S. citizens who traveled to Central America and literally picked up arms to help fight revolutionary struggles.
Others volunteered as medics or helped with rural development projects.
Funkhouser was an ordained Episcopal priest, so his role as a religious leader provided a shield of sorts for himself and those in his orbit.
He was able to bear witness and relay stories back home to the United States about what was really taking place on the ground.
And he also facilitated human connections.
So I set up a project called the Central America Organizing Project.
And that's how I met Judy. I heard that a group of Salvadorans were walking from New York City or Boston to Washington, DC.
And they were looking for places to stay along the way and to eat.
There was a need to host them in Philadelphia.
So I talked to Judy about doing that. I still remember the day they came because they were wearing traditional outfits like sombreros and You know, they had the straight long black hair.
I don't think I'd ever seen an indigenous person.
And she opened the restaurant to this large group of Salvadoran immigrants. and provided, I think, lunch and breakfast or that kind of thing and put them on their way.
And then I remember watching them march on when they left the restaurant carrying their Salvadoran banner and peace signs.
They were appealing to Washington to stop funding the military dictatorship in El Salvador and allow fair and free elections.
Judy Wicks was moved by the experience and wanted to figure out how to do more.
I remember having tears in my eyes because I felt such solidarity, I guess is the word that's used with them, you know, for their fight for justice for their country.
And so that must have been when I got interested in fair trade.
So you think those people told you about fair trade?
No, no. I think it just made me think about. their lives and where do things come from?
You know what I mean? Like, I guess it helped me to see not the exact people that grow coffee, but the in general, the people that grow our coffee look like the people that came for breakfast.
So it gave me a personal relationship in a sense, or a feeling of a personal relationship with people who grow our coffee.
After that encounter, Judy began working activism into her business model, hosting regular political talks at the White Dog Cafe.
At the same time, David Funkhouser was organizing group trips to Central America.
The delegations had the purpose of allowing people to experience reality on the ground.
We wanted people to experience what was happening in Nicaragua, the empowerment of poor people, the commitment to education, There was an amazing literacy crusade in the first couple of years where they sent 100,000 young people out into the countryside to teach people to read and write, to work on those issues.
And so there's no better way than to go and visit the country.
I took 11 delegations from Philadelphia.
Judy wanted to see for herself what was going on. and create a connection that fit within her life as a restaurateur.
I came up with the idea of having a sister restaurant because I figured like sister cities, sister restaurants or whatever, it's a way of having a direct communication.
I thought, well, if I have a direct communication with a local restaurant down there, they could tell me, you know, who are the good guys, the Sandinistas or the Contras?
She at some point was trying to set up a sister restaurant relationships, and she wanted me to do that in Nicaragua.
And I essentially said to her, well, I don't know that I could do that, but I think you have to come with me.
And She had two kids and she had this restaurant and she wasn't sure, but it really took Judy's trip to Nicaragua was a transformative experience.
The sister restaurant Funkhauser brought her to was called Selva Negra.
And as luck would have it, the family that owned the restaurant also owned a coffee plantation.
Eddie and I bought the property in 1975, 50 years ago.
We are descendants from farmers, a long line of coffee growers.
That's Mousy Cool. She and her husband Eddie took over day-to-day operations of the Selva Negra company in 1990, just a few years after Judy's visit.
My dad was a coffee grower since the 19th.
He died in 1977. And then my cousin, first cousin Otto, and my mom was taking care of the hotel and my sister.
They were always family here. By all accounts, the Cools have always treated their workers well, providing housing, food, and schooling for employees' children.
The Sandinistas saw the Kool family as supporters of the revolution, so they were among a small number of private companies who were permitted to stay in operation.
But profit margins were still quite thin.
In the 1980s, the government used to ship the coffee to socialist country. and they pay very little.
Countries like Poland, Romania and East Germany Things began opening up in the mid-1980s, in part because American coffee buyers began visiting Nicaragua.
Traditionally, Nicaragua had been selling to Germany 80% and the United States only 10%.
By the end of 1980, the Americans discovered it.
Judy Wicks was one of those Americans who discovered Selva Negra coffee.
She began serving it at the White Dog Cafe.
That was the first time I switched coffee from whatever our normal corporate purveyor was that supplied the coffee machine and so on.
I think they took their coffee machine away.
We had to buy a new one. The big corporate dominance of the industry was beginning to show some cracks.
Plus, according to Judy, the regulars and the staff said the Selva Negra coffee tasted better. after we started having the Nicaraguan coffee, it was in my consciousness about knowing where your coffee comes from, who the suppliers are, and, you know, that they're wonderful people just like everywhere else.
There are people, just like the ones that came for the El Salvador breakfast, and you want them to have a living wage.
So this is what fair trade looked like before it was widely known as fair trade.
Activist entrepreneurs like Judy Wicks, mostly in Europe and North America, were trying to conduct business in what they saw as a more ethical way.
Some referred to it as solidarity trade or alternative trade.
Often it didn't have a name at all. And because it wasn't very organized yet, it was often cobbled together in partnership with other like-minded businesses.
I actually brought someone with me on the trip, one of our white dog trips, who was a business person.
And he got the idea of importing coffee from Nicaragua.
And I said, if he did, I would buy it from the White Dog.
So you at least have one customer. And so he started importing the beans and roasting them.
It was not necessarily certified as fair trade by third party observer.
But we knew because we were dealing directly with the farmers that it was fair trade because it was whatever the farmers set the price and we would buy from the farmers.
The idea of a more equitable trade system had existed way before this.
In fact, a proto-pioneer of the fair trade movement was another woman from Pennsylvania.
Edna Ruth Beiler was a Mennonite who in the 1940s began bringing handicrafts from Puerto Rico to the mainland U.S., Her venture later grew into a chain of stores called 10,000 Villages.
A lot of it's about helping refugees. Professor Gavin Friedle again.
A lot of it is with Christian groups. social justice-oriented Christian groups, especially in the U.S., In the 50s and the 60s, Fair Trade in the US, Fair Trade in Europe, it was really about a bunch of different organizations solidarity with refugees was really common.
And that was sort of really what they were doing more was working with either refugees or with a sense of, you know, poor craftspeople and farmers.
And so they started building these kind of direct relationships.
And it was either to try to provide better income in the South, but it was also to work with refugees that had come to the US come to Europe and sort of provide them with opportunities.
Friedel says things started to change in the 70s and 80s.
The Vietnam generation had been radicalized, and they were more assertive about pushing back against the global dominance of Western wealthy nations.
Volunteer groups became less religious and charity-based.
Instead, the focus was on political solidarity and working together in partnership with producers.
There's this organization called Breaking the Science Network, and they talk about Fair Trade Plus.
And one of the ways to think of the plus is that actually fair trade was the plus.
And what I mean by that is that to a lot of those organizations, the activism and the solidarity was the mission. working in solidarity with specific groups in El Salvador, in Nicaragua.
That was the mission in Guatemala. And then fair trade is actually the plus, which is that, OK, so while we're helping you, you know, with human rights and that can often mean like going down and observing events and stuff. to make sure the government doesn't do violent things.
While we're assisting you in that front, what else can we assist you with?
Oh, okay, well, we can help you try to sell your coffee for a higher price.
So the Fair Trade Plus model actually makes Fair Trade the plus and makes the solidarity central to what they do.
Judy Wicks was all about solidarity. She later partnered with Zapatista Coffee Growers in Chiapas, Mexico, as a way to support that revolutionary group's mission.
The Zapatistas had emerged from the jungle on New Year's Day in 1994, just as NAFTA, or the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect.
By the time the Mexican army arrived on the scene, the Zapatistas had taken control of four towns.
The largest, San Cristobal de las Casas, Marcos and his troops ransacked the municipal building but carefully avoided civilian bloodshed.
In their iconic black face masks, the Zapatistas advocate for local indigenous control of land and natural resources, and have repeatedly battled with the Mexican government.
They also established numerous cooperative business enterprises.
Because of the region's terrain and climate, coffee was already a part of the local economy.
In this archival video produced by the Zapatistas, members of the Mutwitz Coffee Co-op describe their coffee growing methods and operational history. we were only 500 producers but until now in these dates that we are in the year 2000
Luis Gonzalez Ruiz, president of the co-op's board of directors at the time, explains how they increased from 500 to more than 1,000 producers by the year 2000.
The negotiations with the buyer are few that come here in the state of Chiapas.
But he adds that very few of the buyers travel to Chiapas to negotiate, and he's hoping for a larger market and better prices so that the producers' families can more adequately meet their needs.
How can we support the Zapatistas as we did the Sandinistas economically?
Like she did in Nicaragua, Judy brought other justice-minded businesses into the endeavor in Mexico to leverage their purchasing power. we helped the Zapatistas to have enough customers where they could afford to export a whole container of coffee.
Because if you couldn't fill the container, it wasn't economical to ship it.
So by my bringing down coffee importers to Chiapas to meet with the cooperative, I was able to build enough business for us to buy a container of coffee.
She remembers this unique scene during negotiations.
When we brought down business people to do a deal with the Zapatistas, we were in this sitting around like a board table with masked men.
Zapatistas came in wearing masks. It was like being in a movie or something.
So some of them didn't even speak Spanish.
They spoke an indigenous language. And so there was no like informal chitchat to understand like they did have their guns with them.
Despite the cultural hurdles, the partnership was a success.
The white dog began serving coffee from Mutwitz.
But what Judy Wicks was doing was a lot of work.
In addition to running her restaurant, she was essentially having to create her own supply chain.
Most business owners didn't have the time, energy, or skill set for all that.
The person-to-person model was also limited in its benefit for small coffee growers.
Selling coffee to a handful of do-gooders was nice, but for the most part, they were still beholden to pricey exporters and coyotes. a nickname for the middlemen who charged significant fees.
They wanted direct access to a larger market.
Enter the Fair Trade label. Look for the label.
Choose Fair Trade. Fair trade labeling initiatives certify products as being produced in a way that meets certain standards, like fair pay and humane working conditions.
The goal is to make it easy for a shopper to know they're buying something made in a humane way.
So the values of fair trade would be, you know, no exploitation of child labor, labor rights, gender equality, agroecological, agriculture. assisting people that need more by giving them special premiums so they can build projects and stuff.
So now it's over to you in your daily shopping.
Look for the fair trademark and choose products that change lives.
The first to implement a specific fair trade label was a Dutch group called Max Havelaar in 1988.
They initially partnered with coffee farmers in Oaxaca, Mexico, but soon expanded to other countries.
The first time we heard about Trey was in the 1980s.
Eddie Kuhl from the Selva Negra plantation in Nicaragua was a witness to the transition.
I remember they were from Holland. They say that they wanted to buy directly to the small farmers and to cooperatives in order to help them So they won't be exploited by high standard coffee growers.
Eddie and Mousy Kuhl's farm was a little too large for official fair trade standards, But they watched over the next few years as a wave of equity-minded international buyers began to create space for an alternative economic structure.
Mousy Kool remembers. Fairtrade came in more than anything else to remove the small producers from the coyotes.
The coyotes were buying their coffee very cheap, sending it to the exporter.
So the fair trade came in and said, hey, we're going to pay an overprice. to the small producers so that they can send their kids to school so they can advance on their standard of life.
And they were auditing the exporters to make sure that instead of going through the coyotes, they were going straight to the exporters. in order to pay the small workers.
Fair trade labels started appearing in countries all over Europe, not just on coffee, but products like chocolate, tea, and honey.
Soon, there were so many different labeled and unlabeled initiatives popping up, that a larger umbrella group called Fair Trade International was established in 1997.
It tried to consolidate and avoid consumer confusion.
Then, in 1998, another major label was created, Transfair USA, now known as Fair Trade USA.
Its roots were with a coffee co-op in Nicaragua. the workers got a little bit smarter and they organized themselves in small cooperatives.
They were dealing directly with fur trade.
So they were not coyotes in between. The cooperative started exporting through the mills and through the exporting companies.
Nowadays, they have their own meals. They deal directly with their buyers.
They are a lot more organized. All that came in the 2000s.
Working conditions were slowly but steadily improving.
And on the buyer's side, the Fairtrade label exposed millions more people to the possibility of ethical shopping.
But initially, fair trade products were only sold in specialty shops.
Consumers needed to seek them out. In order to go big, the average shopper needed to see fair trade products in stores they already frequented.
So the focus soon became pressuring large companies to adopt fair trade buying practices.
And they have this model of let's get more conventional corporations on board.
Let's get them to buy as much freight trade as we can.
Some smaller companies incorporated Fairtrade into their product lines quickly and willingly, But the bigger ones often resisted and were only brought on board by activist pressure campaigns.
Probably the most well-known was Starbucks.
But Sara Lee and Procter & Gamble also agreed to sell Fairtrade coffee only after years of cajoling.
This was a warning sign, says Fridell. Corporations have their own agenda items, and it's not necessarily deep moral commitment to what these projects are.
It's more about they feel a certain kind of pressure, they get on board.
If the pressure wanes, then they get off board.
For the first decade or so, the growth of fair trade-labeled coffee was exponential.
It was the trendy, hot new thing, and everybody either wanted in or felt they had to be part of it.
And by all accounts, there were real gains in quality of life for many people around the world involved in coffee production.
Fridell did an in-depth study of two Mexican coffee producing communities from 1998 to 2003.
He found that household income and food security increased among families working on fair trade coffee, And those families even ate more meat and borrowed less money than conventional coffee farmers.
But soon that growth curve started to flatten.
Starbucks, for example, topped out at around 8.5% of their coffee being certified fair trade.
They've since pulled out completely and have their own verification program called Coffee and Farmer Equity, abbreviated CAFE, CAFE.
Labels with different focuses popped up too, like organic or non-GMO.
Other certification seals focused on environmental sustainability, As those kinds of things has become popular, it becomes very difficult to separate something like fair trade certification from all the claims that every corporation now knows they have to make.
And so the average consumer going through the supermarket aisle with a kid on their arm and there's 25 bags of coffee and each one of them is claiming something.
How are you supposed to know one from the other?
In learning about all this history, the consensus seems to be that fair trade labeling was, and still is, a good thing. that actually does improve lives, at least in some cases.
But like any system, there are ways to game it. and it's tough as a consumer to know exactly which products are having a real impact.
So these days, some of the old school fair trade practitioners are looking for a better way.
Thank you. On a busy street in Mexico City's historic Coyoacan neighborhood, there's a little coffee shop called Cafetel Chilango.
A Sign Outside advertises, in Spanish, organic and fair trade coffee from small-scale producer cooperatives in Chiapas.
The cafe's owner, Geronimo Pruin, says he knows the limitations of what he's advertising.
I've never thought that through Fairtrade we are going to transform the society as a whole and trade as a whole.
I think I was born too late for believing in that utopia.
Pruin is a longtime veteran of the fair trade coffee movement, Originally from Holland, he actually volunteered with the Max Havillard Foundation when it was starting up in the late 1980s.
Even the founder of For the Fair Trade Movement, Frans van der Rohe sometimes says, well, I'm not really sure if the model we choose was the right one, but it was the only one feasible at the moment.
Pruin says the larger companies doing fair trade these days are often doing what he calls combo trade.
They sell a bit of fair trade coffee, but most of their products are not certified.
They might even buy two batches of coffee from the same grower at two different prices, some fair trade and some uncertified.
That large-scale combo trade enables them to subsidize their fair trade products, so to speak, by charging artificially low prices.
And while that might lead consumers to buy those beans, it also lowers expectations about price.
Coffee drinkers are being trained to pay too little for fair trade coffee, which kind of defeats the entire point.
Fairtrade's model also wasn't able to shield it from industry-wide price spikes in the 2020s. stemming from the COVID pandemic, drought-affected harvests, and increased global demand, particularly from China.
And the root of the problem, says Pruin, is that when big companies got involved in fair trade, the goal became maximizing their own profits. not profits for the actual producers.
Fairtrade's by its own meaning this actually cannot really exist because it's either fair or straight.
Pruin's trying to improve on the model by going backwards in a way.
In 2006, he created a label called SPP Global.
It's a small producer symbol. They won't give their certification to individual farmers or private producers, only cooperatives.
The reason why, says Pruin, is that co-ops are democratically organized and they enable collaboration between growers instead of competition.
It's a way of getting back to the holistic view of fair trade as not just a marketing tool, but a boost in moving communities towards self-determination.
Many of these co-ops, they used to be what they call multi-item-ish organizations.
So they were fighting for land rights. fighting for access to health and food and many, many other issues.
Pruin's Coffee Shop is also putting a different twist on classic fair trade because there's no importation taking place.
All the coffee sold at Cafetel Chilango is grown in-country, in Mexico.
It's actually easier to pay fair trade prices within the country than outside of the country because you don't pay the exportation prices and such.
Which brings us back to Judy Wicks and her revolutionary but now widespread philosophy about knowing where your food and coffee comes from.
Fair trade doesn't necessarily have to be imports.
You want to have fair trade where the growers are making a living, whether it's your local Eggman or whether it's coffee growers from Mexico.
Judy sold the White Dog Cafe in 2009, but in the few years leading up to that, she made official the peer-to-peer network she had been building for decades.
She founded Fair Food Philly, as well as the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, And Common Future, a business alliance for local economies with a focus on Black-owned businesses.
Ultimately, what my work has been about, whether you're talking about fair trade coffee or tomatoes, is providing an alternative to the corporate controlled economy. that benefits everyone on the supply chain, that no one is exploited.
Back in the 1970s, when Judy Wicks was learning the ropes of the restaurant business and the Fairtrade label was still in the womb, The corporate takeover of the food industry wasn't something most people were aware of.
Most folks hadn't yet realized their meat and produce often no longer came from the farms in the next county over or even the same country.
And even if they did, there wasn't much understanding of how severely the people producing the food were being exploited.
Things are different now. One marketing research firm estimated in 2024 that the global market for ethical food is somewhere over $136 billion. and it's growing.
That umbrella term, ethical food, doesn't just include fair trade, but also organic and natural, free range, welfare friendly, environmentally responsible, and sustainably produced.
These are all terms that barely existed 50 years ago, and now many of them are mainstream.
The fair trade movement isn't perfect, but it undeniably helped build awareness about how complex food systems are. and that there are cracks in that giant machine that individuals working person-to-person on the ground can chip away at.
A cup of coffee or a bag of coffee beans can't change the world.
But thinking about the long road that coffee has taken as we sip it or smell it should remind us that the world still needs to, and can, change.
Thanks to Andrew Stelzer for bringing us today's story.
Next time on Proof. What is a Chicago-style Euro, and how is it different from other style Euros?
Chicago style euro. I've never had a Chicago style euro.
The name of the restaurant is Chicago style euros.
My bad. Our reporter investigates the origin story of the Chicago-style Ural.
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This episode was hosted by me, Jack Bishop.
And the podcast is made by the following cast of characters.
I'm Yumi Araki, the managing producer. I'm associate producer, Louise Kern-Kensler.
And I'm Kyla Foreman Andrade, the TV and podcast intern.
Audio services are provided by Ultraviolet Audio. and sound design by Matt Boynton, Brian Campbell of Signal Sounds composed our theme music, Additional music by Kyle Forrester and Jordan Pearson.
Is our director of post-production and our director of production.
Sarah D. Collins. Special thanks to everyone who talked to Andrew for the story and to Jimena Ramos from SPP Global.
Nina Gianelli is the Senior Vice President of Television, Video and Podcasts.
Dan Souza is the Chief Content Officer, and Dan Surratt is America's Test Kitchen's CEO.
Proof is a production of America's Test Kitchen.
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