Comments on: Starbucks Challenge update: 1st chat with Starbucks

By: Jen

Jen — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

It’s good to hear that Starbucks in hitting your site.

By: BlondebutBright

BlondebutBright — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Wow, girl, you do your research. I visited Starbucks several times in Chicago this past weekend, much to my dismay. Keep up the good work!

By: Yoga Korunta

Yoga Korunta — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Did Starbucks endorse a candidate last November?

By: Transmogrifier

Transmogrifier — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hey! good to see your post about your chat with Cindy. Cafe Estima is indeed brewing at my local starbucks since Monday. Thanks for considering my questions. I am going to come up with more I am sure!. Thanks to this challenge I am learning more about Fair trade movement. I am mostly going through wikipedia entries and other websites and blogs. I found an interesting PDF file on the transfair website which says that Maxwell house and Folgers provide coffee to 56% of the US market. Thats huge isn’t it? Any idea how much fair trade coffee they sell? Do they have any fair trade certified blends at all? I checked their websites but didn’t find any!(although I didn’t do a thorough check). It seems that unless these big brands start selling fair trade, the market share is not going to increase. I have to admit that although I love coffee I am mostly an instant coffee drinker at home and only at work I drink brewed coffee. So I don’t know much about Folgers and Maxwell house.
Sorry for hogging your comment space LA girl.

By: Siel

Siel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Transmogrifier — Hog away :) Really, it’s great to see how many people — once they find out more about fair trade — want to find out more and do more to mitigate the coffee crisis going on.

Yes — Maxwell and Folgers do indeed provide more than half the coffee to the US market. This is really gross — most importantly in terms of the poor farmers out there, but also in terms of the fact that Maxwell and Folgers make really, really crappy, gross-tasting coffee. It’s a wakeup call sometimes, realizing that a lot of people just really don’t care about taste, let alone labor standards.

In any case, there’s a lot of controversy surrounding this cheap yet popular coffee — Everything from small roasters getting disgusted at FLO for fair trade certifying a Nestle coffee — another totally gross coffee maker with horrid labor and trade practices — to internal debates between fair trade diehards. Some say that the focus should be on small coffee roasters that’ve based their whole business model on working outside of traditional “free trade” models, while others argue that, for the fair trade movement to tap into the mass market, negotiations with big bad companies like Nestle (and, less bad but still big companies like Starbucks) are vital…

BbB — give us some more detailed feedback about Starbucks’ fair trade friendliness in the windy city :)

Yoga Korunta — As far as I know, Starbucks as a company did not endorse a candidate. However, 100% of Starbucks’ political contributions by its corporate heads have been to democrats. Which, in addition to Starbucks progressive policies that give part time workers health coverage and stock options, really warms me up to the company, fair trade issues aside… See BuyBlue.org for more stats on this.

By: Roger, Gone Green

Roger, Gone Green — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Amusingly, the Sbucks at Walnut & Hill in Pasadena likewise has the Estima up (it is pretty good, by the by) but no suggestion that it is FairTrade . . .

Interesting quandry: Is it better that corporate powers switch, albeit slowly, to including FT coffees without comment, or is the PR value for more consumer education important?

R.