For the past twenty years, the Ethiquable brand has been offering a wide range of food products, including chocolate and coffee, from fair trade and organic farming, but following its own ethics, which pushes it to go beyond the already high standards of these sectors.
Created in France in 2003 around a few emblematic Fair Trade products such as coffee and cocoa, the Ethiquable brand is now available in a wide range of products and in several countries, including Belgium, where a sister cooperative was founded in 2009 by Vincent De Grelle and Stephan Vincent.
‘While in the early days we mainly marketed French products, we gradually began to develop our own Belgian products, while maintaining this very close partnership with France, which in a way remains the custodian of the brand’, explains the first of the two co-founders of Ethiquable Benelux. In webshops, organic shops and even supermarkets via the Terra Etica brand, the ethical brand is also present in a wide range of sales channels, including B2B through partnerships with a number of institutional players and the hotel and catering industry. All in all, the various Ethiquable sister cooperatives (France, Benelux, Spain, etc.) sell several tens of millions of items each year, with a combined turnover of around seven million euros.
Four pillars
As its name suggests, Ethiquable places a great deal of importance on ethics and fairness in its approach, but not only that. In fact, its philosophy is based on four main pillars. ‘The first is to work only with cooperatives of small-scale producers, all over the world, based on the observation that the gap between industrial agriculture and family farming keeps on widening’, continues Vincent De Grelle, who trained as an agricultural engineer. ‘One of the major challenges for the years to come will be to succeed in preserving this small-scale agriculture, because it is the guarantor of the preservation of know-how, management methods, biodiversity, soil health and water quality. This concern for the environment is reflected in the second pillar of Ethiquable’s philosophy, namely the promotion and support of mixed farming and agroforestry. ‘When you have coffee, cocoa, bananas, mangoes, trees for wood, manioc, etc. on the same plot of land, instead of growing only one crop, you are creating a diversity of crops, which in turn will lead to a high level of natural biodiversity, as well as a root network to improve soil retention, in regions where rainfall is becoming increasingly problematic due to global warming. Ultimately, this helps to maintain soil fertility rather than impoverishing it.
Fair trade, truly fair trade
This naturally leads to the third pillar on which Ethiquable’s philosophy is based: organic farming. ‘All our products are certified organic,’ confirms Vincent De Grelle. ‘I’d even go so far as to say that we go further than the requirements of the organic label. For example, we have helped several of our partner cooperatives to stop relying on external organic fertilisers. How do we do this? By helping them to make their own fertilisers from local forest substrate, which contains enough natural insecticides and herbicides to do the job. This know-how was first developed in Peru, in what we call biofabricas, and has gradually been transferred to other producers in Ecuador, Côte d’Ivoire, etc. Finally, the last essential pillar of the project has been the development of new technologies.
Last but not least, fair trade is an essential pillar of the Ethiquable project. And not just any fair trade, since the ethical brand chose from the outset to adhere to the SPP (Symbole Small Producers) label. ‘In the early 2000s, producers from the South came to the conclusion that they no longer saw themselves in the Fairtrade label, that they were not sufficiently represented or heard, and that it had become mainly a label for European retailers, focused on large flows of generalist products, and that a whole series of products were not taken into account. So they decided to create their own label’, continues the co-founder of Ethiquable Benelux. ‘We encouraged them to do so, because the aim was to create a label that would promote family and cooperative farming, which is one of our pillars. And as a bonus, the label also goes much further in terms of financing, with the SPP minimum price being much higher and covering many more cost items than that proposed by Fairtrade’. Does this mean that the producers in this sector systematically achieve a living income? ‘It is indeed a criterion that is taken into account when setting the minimum price. To be honest, it’s not even an issue for us. All the producers in our sector achieve the living income and even exceed it. In addition to this minimum price, a supplementary premium is paid to the cooperatives themselves so that they can finance the economic or social projects of their choice, not forgetting an organic premium.
Bringing added value (back) to the South
In addition, fair trade as understood by Ethiquable also involves trying to bring or bring back as much added value as possible to the producer countries, i.e. by ensuring that as many products as possible are processed locally by the cooperatives. ‘When we talk about fair trade, we often think about buying raw materials at a fair price’, says Vincent De Grelle. ‘At Ethiquable, however, our ambition is to go further. By buying a product that has already been processed, the added value created remains with the producer, so the price paid is even more fair. What’s more, it also creates a form of reappropriation of the production chain by the producers themselves. As a result, the further a producer is able to go in the production process and get closer to the finished product, the better, in our view. In the cocoa sector, this will be reflected in the fact that Ethiquable is increasingly trying to import cocoa mass – i.e. beans that have been roasted, ground and exported in block form – rather than dried beans. ‘I think we’re the only ones doing this at the moment. Initially, we worked on this with producers in Peru and now we’re extending it to Guatemala. But we don’t intend to stop there. In the future, our ambition is to develop similar projects in Haiti, Madagascar and even Côte d’Ivoire. For coffee, on the other hand, the same approach is less obvious insofar as it ideally needs to be consumed fairly quickly after roasting to retain all its aromas, which is why this process continues to be carried out in Europe. ‘But in any case, it is dried, pulped, de-pulped, etc. on site, but that applies to all the players in the sector. What is interesting, however, is that some of our partners have in the meantime developed roasting capacity, with our support, which means they can now sell their products on the local market.
Combining the two sectors, cocoa and coffee, Ethiquable works with around twenty cooperatives in as many countries, mainly in South America and Africa. ‘All payments to producers are managed by France,’ adds our contact. ‘We analyse our needs, then go through France to pool our purchases from the cooperatives. Thanks to this way of working, we can achieve fairly substantial economies of scale. And, of course, Ethiquable France puts in place all the necessary safeguards to ensure that the cooperatives pay the money back to their members and that all operations are carried out as they should be, which is essential.’ From the four corners of the world, cocoa and coffee then arrive in France to be processed into finished products. ‘We own our own chocolate factory in the Gers, which represented an investment of between €20 and €30 million. We produce our chocolate bars and couverture for our chocolate-making customers from cocoa mass that we receive directly from the producers, or from cocoa processed from the beans by a Dutch intermediary. As far as coffee is concerned, there are two flows. In the first, the green coffee arrives in Le Havre and we send it to a Belgian roaster who roasts it for us. In the second, which concerns the Terra Etica brand, the coffee beans are roasted in France at the facilities of Café Michel, which has recently been fully integrated into Ethiquable. Café Michel is in the process of being completely transformed into Terra Etica.‘
‘Politicians have a role to play in setting an example by buying fair trade products’.
The other side of the coin for Ethiquable’s philosophy is that the brand constantly finds itself on the knife-edge between high (and therefore expensive) criteria and standards in terms of sustainability in the broadest sense and prices that must nevertheless remain at least competitive with those charged by other players in the sector, a problem exacerbated by consumers’ current high sensitivity to price. ‘We believe that when a product is too cheap, someone has to pay the difference, whether it’s the producer, the environment or the consumer,’ stresses Vincent De Grelle. ‘As a result, we are constantly striving to offer products that are fairly priced for the producer, have a minimal impact on the environment and are of high quality for the consumer. But all this is, of course, a journey. We don’t claim to have products that are absolutely irreproachable, but we do try. And this comes at a cost, a cost that consumers are not always prepared to pay. Of course, it’s normal for consumers to pay attention to price. But I would also ask them to consider the proportion of their overall budget spent on food compared with other items of expenditure. And they should also look at the labels. People don’t always realise it, but the first ingredient to appear on the label is always the one that is most present in the product in percentage terms, and so on. Simply asking yourself what you’re really eating is already a step in the right direction’.
On the other hand, Vincent De Grelle is far less indulgent when it comes to consumption by ‘institutional’ consumers. ‘Politicians clearly have a role to play in setting an example by buying fair trade products’, he says. ‘Even today, it’s still very complicated to get into a public market to sell our products… Price remains an essential criterion. We have signed a few contracts with one government department or another, but it’s all very anecdotal. Beyond that, I believe that politicians also have a responsibility to communicate better on these issues of sustainability and fairness, and to do so systematically, not just on the margins. Above all, they have a duty to put in place a framework that encourages and promotes farming that respects producers and the environment.
