In advance of World Fair Trade Day, May 10, The Packer sat down with Jennie Coleman, president and co-owner of Equifruit, a Montreal-based importer of Fairtrade International-certified bananas, to discuss the importance of keeping fair trade top of mind and the ongoing challenge to raise banana prices.
What does World Fair Trade Day mean to you?
Jennie Coleman: World Fair Trade Day is an annual reminder of our mission and a chance to communicate our mission more broadly to our customers. But for Equifruit, every day is World Fair Trade Day, because we’re a 100% Fairtrade-certified banana company.
On World Fair Trade Day, we can think about how very small actions that we can take through our consumption choices can have a huge ripple effect in countries we may never see close up but whose stories we will read in the newspaper.
Fair trade is really a way of thinking about sustainable supply chains — making sure there’s a fair distribution of value along those supply chains. Happy communities in producing countries make for a happier world — one with less poverty, less migration, less violence. And I think World Fair Trade Day reminds us that we’re in a world of global trade, where we can each do our bit to make that world a better place.
What has Equifruit’s growth trajectory been since its inception?
Equifruit was founded in 2006 in Quebec by a mother-daughter team who sold me the business in 2013. Since then, our business has grown exponentially. In 2013, we were doing barely a container per week and now we’re doing 30 times that volume — and with that volume comes impact.
What’s lovely is that it’s not just my mom eating all those 30 containers of bananas. Our growth is a testament to the fact that consumers are on board with this — that consumers are buying our bananas on a regular basis every week and have made it a habit to adopt fair trade in their banana purchases.
What challenges remain as Equifruit continues its mission of #fairtradebanana domination?
The principal challenge that we face is still changing mindsets on banana pricing. We meet lots of buyers who say to us, “We love Equifruit. We love your energy. We love your mission. We understand the need for change in the banana industry, but we’re worried about raising banana prices to consumers with fair trade.”
Equifruit respects a Fairtrade minimum price and contributes a Fairtrade social premium to our growers. And each of those bumps add to the cost because we are paying for sustainable economical, social and environmental production.
Fairtrade International looks at the health and safety of workers; environmental stewardship; wages or income for small growers — these are all part of Fairtrade, but fair trade is even bigger than that. It’s thinking about ways that we can find solutions in our world to make sure that there’s a more just distribution of value that we don’t enjoy cheap fruit here while someone else pays for that elsewhere. Fair trade is still business, but it’s business within this ethical framework.
In the more than a decade since you’ve been in the Fairtrade-certified banana business, are there success stories that stand out in communities where you’ve seen the direct and positive impact of fair trade?
We’ve worked with a cooperative of small growers in northern Peru since the very first container that Equifruit brought in, in December of 2007, and each visit that I’ve had since then shows a progression in the community, which is so exciting.
These are microproducers. Together they are 500 growers farming 700 hectares of land. None of these people is going to get rich off fair trade, but their housing has improved and the opportunities available to their children is light years from what they had growing up. Each of these visits reminds me of the importance of long-term relationships in fair trade.
We’re not just going to jump in opportunistically and buy a container or two. We’re going to really work with growers as partners on the development of quality fruit and the impact we can have in their communities.
What kind of growth are you seeing in terms of demand for fair trade products?
I can speak about the growth in sales for Fairtrade-certified bananas in the Canadian market, which have grown basically following our growth, as we are the largest player in the North American market with bananas.
Fairtrade international put a moratorium on new farm applications because there was, in fact, more supply of fair trade bananas than there was market demand for them, and this is really the job that we at Equifruit put on our shoulders.
Our role is to find markets for growers on Fairtrade terms — to do that mind change or mindset conversion in the North American market — because we can’t give false hope to growers and continue certifying them, which takes time and resources, if there isn’t a market.
This really goes back to Equifruit needing to speak to as many people as possible and getting retail buyers to understand that we’ve had a terrific deal on bananas for the last 100 years, and now it’s time to think differently about our banana supply chains.
And in our experience, consumers are going to follow. They are not as price sensitive to bananas as the retail golden rule of cheap bananas would suggest, and retailers who work with Equifruit, who follow a fair-trade program, often benefit from kind of a halo effect, from their customers — of course — but even from their employees, who are proud to work for a company which has taken a responsible procurement policy from their shareholders. There are lots of reasons to increase demand, so we can increase supply, and change the banana industry.
What’s next for Equifruit?
Our focus continues to be to develop the U.S. market. We saw in the Canadian market that it took us many years to get buyers interested in Equifruit and the idea of changing their banana program. And we’re still going through that now, so we accept that this is a long-term project, but the U.S. market has much opportunity for us.
