By Emily Senger
Cocoa Camino mint chocolate bars are flying off the shelves at Hartman’s grocery store, even though the fair trade, organic, blend of dark chocolate and crunchy peppermint bits rings in at a pricey $4.
“The chocolates, it’s amazing how many we sell,” Hartman’s assistant manager Janet Kennedy says as she gestures to a display of the chocolate bars, which are wrapped in bright green, purple and orange paper.
Hartman’s general manager Robert St-Amour says the store sells about 120 of the bars each week, a testament to the popularity of the fair trade product.
The Centretown-inspired Cocoa Camino bars are part of a growing trend of fair trade certified products, which is proving to be a sweet business for suppliers and grocers in Ottawa and across the country.
The fair trade movement hit Canada in 1997 when five companies were licensed to use the fair trade certified logo. The logo indicates the product has undergone an audit to ensure producers in developing countries are paid a fair price.
Since then Transfair Canada—the body responsible for licensing fair trade products in Canada—has added new products annually and currently licenses a dozen products including spices, flowers and wine.
Now there are more than 200 Canadian companies licensed to put the fair trade logo on their products and according to Transfair sales of fair trade goods in Canada were almost $83 million in 2006, with just over $10 million from cocoa products.
Tia Loftsgard is the woman behind the Cocoa Camino bars. The co-founder of La Siembra Co-operative began packaging Cocoa Camino brand organic, fair trade hot chocolate in 1999 in the First United Church basement on Florence and Kent Streets. Loftsgard and the two other founders did $40,000 in sales in their first year.
Seven years later, La Siembra has moved out of the basement and into the spotlight with an office at the corner of Florence and Bank Streets, 18 staff and an expanded line of more than 50 cocoa and sugar products. La Siembra brought in $5.4 million in sales last year.
Loftsgard attributes her success in the fair trade business to conscientious Canadians who care about their consumption habits.
“It’s not trendy, as in it’s not something that is going to go away. We’ve seen it with all companies—people are asking companies to have more of a socially responsible component to their business,” Loftsgard says from her office.
Loftsgard refers to La Siembra as a fair trade “pioneer,” the first company in North America to sell fair trade certified cocoa and sugar.
As Loftsgard has discovered, many consumers want assurances that products are fairly and ethically traded and are willing to pay for this knowledge.
Down the block from the La Siembra office at Hartman’s, Kennedy says consumer interest means more fair trade products are getting onto grocery store shelves.
“We have customers requesting the product and the person—the broker or the company—is trying to sell their product,” Kennedy says. “It has to be at the right price for the customer to buy it to generate some sales for us as well.”
Across the street at Herb and Spice, a natural food store, owner Jean-Christophe Arsenault says he sells “hundreds and hundreds” of the Cocoa Camino bars each month. He says the sales are indicative of fair trade’s move from a niche market to mainstream.
“More of the big corporations see that it’s something that is trendy and they want their part of the share,” Arsenault says.
Big chains are catching on, too. Cocoa Camino products have been available at Loblaws since 2003 and in October, the chocolate giant Hershey purchased Dagoba, an Oregon-based fair trade, organic chocolate company.
“The question is, is that still a fair trade product?” asks Arsenault, noting Herb and Spice discontinued the Dagoba brand because he doesn’t support Hershey.
The trend goes beyond chocolate. Transfair currently licenses 12 products: coffee, tea, cocoa, bananas, sugar, wine, spices, flowers, rice, cotton, sports balls such as basketball and soccer balls and quinoa—a grain grown in South America.
“It really is moving more into the mainstream. The numbers have really gone up this year,” says Transfair communications coordinator Reykia Fick from her office on Somerset Street.
“Fair trade is following the same sort of direction as the organics movement with the extreme growth.”
In the open-concept Transfair office, phones ring incessantly and pictures of smiling workers picking coffee, cocoa and bananas in developing countries hang on the wall above the commotion. More than ever, Canadians want to know they are supporting—not exploiting—such producers, Fick says.
“There is a shift happening where people are becoming aware of their consumption habits,” she says.