Florida-based organic, vertical farming company Hardee Fresh has joined the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program. The partnership signals Fair Food Program’s entry into the growing leafy greens market and marks Hardee Fresh as Fair Food Program’s first participating grower in the rapidly-expanding vertical farming sector.
Launched in 2011, CIW’s Fair Food Program began as a way support farmworkers in Florida’s $500 million tomato industry. The program has since gained recognition for monitoring and enforcing workplace protections on U.S. farms, including winning a Presidential Medal for Extraordinary Efforts to Combat Trafficking in 2015.
“At Hardee Fresh we want to provide the best produce for our customers and the best working conditions and opportunities for advancement for our workers. We want to be the best steward of the environment in the agricultural industry and the best citizen in the communities in which we live and work. Participation in the Fair Food Program furthers our pursuit of our goal and just the most recent expression of our longstanding core beliefs,”
The Fair Food Program functions as a partnership among farmworkers, participating growers like Hardee Fresh, and produce buyers who agree to pay growers a premium that is passed on to workers as a bonus on their regular paychecks. The Fair Food Program’s monitoring tools include a 24-hour trilingual complaint hotline, worker-to-worker rights education, comprehensive field and farm office audits and market consequences for violations of its human rights-based code of conduct.
“The world of agriculture is changing, and the rise of vertical farming is a key example of that shifting landscape. We’re excited to welcome Hardee Fresh into the Program, and to show once again that, when there is mutual commitment, the Fair Food Program can be successfully adapted to nearly any crop and farming environment. With the dedication of all the partners, and the leadership of farmworkers themselves, together we can ensure that these jobs, whether indoors or outdoors, are fair and dignified,” Leonel Perez of CIW said in the release.
