When Didier Clarisse and his wife took over an artisanal waffle bakery, they wanted to expand the business, but it soon became clear that a large industrial business was not their piece of cake. Instead, they ventured into a quality approach. After exploring the market they switched to organic waffles and shortly after to fair trade too.
‘Give back what you take’ sums up New Tree’s mission. This Belgian company does not just want to make chocolate; it wants to make healthy chocolate with surprising flavours. In exchange for what the planet gives us the company advocates a greener and fairer world. We already know that chocolate is healthy, but that chocolate can be responsible and sustainable is new and requires some explanation.
Large companies are about making profits, and nothing else. Supposedly. Java, one of the largest food service companies in Belgium, is different and combines entrepreneurship with a conviction that wealth must be shared globally. This family business does this mainly by selling fair trade coffee which it roasts in its state-of-the-art sustainable roasting facilities in Rotselaar, Belgium.
Cavalier, a family business, has been manufacturing chocolate with no added sugars for exactly twenty years. First, it did so with the alternative sweetener maltitol, and more recently mainly with stevia. When the product range was renewed, Cavalier resolutely went fair trade.
When you ask how many honest products Carrefour offers, you get one back: What do you mean by honest products? The supermarket chain does not see fair trade as a separate product line. For both the products from the southern and northern hemisphere, they must be developed with respect for the producer, planet and customer.
With Colruyt, Bio-Planet and Okay, the Colruyt Group is one of the strongholds of Belgium’s retail sector. Does this holding which focuses on growth and profit have any attention for sustainable trade? Yes, indeed, so it seems. In addition to its supply of fair trade products, the Colruyt Group launched ‘value chain projects’ a few years ago in an attempt to ‘sustainabilify’ the producer-to-consumer value chain.
After petrol, coffee is the world’s biggest export product. It is almost exclusively cultivated in developing countries. The coffee trade therefore has a huge impact on the working and living conditions of local coffee producers, their families and on nature, according to Beyers’website. Beyers is a coffee roaster which offers a broad certified coffee assortment, representing 40% of its sales.
This study, commissioned by the Trade for Development Centre (TDC) and realized by Dedicated between December 21, 2015 and January 29, 2016, attempted to draw up a statement of condition on the presence of sustainable products within the assortments of major Belgian supermarkets.
In 1965 Belgian and Peruvian ministers signed a first development cooperation agreement. Half a century later the Belgian development agency is still operating in the Andes country where the Trade for Development Centre supports five fair and sustainable trade projects. Reason enough to go and visit the cocoa farmers, physalis producers, loggers, textile workers and miners behind these projects.
Projects in Peru, Congo and Morocco highlight the fact that to turn fair and sustainable trade into a means of leverage in the fight against poverty and inequality reduction – which is the Trade for Development Centre’s view – two questions must be kept in mind when approving projects: who does the work when producing goods and who manages the profits once the project boosts revenue?
