In terms of the big 4 — I mentioned these because together, they control 70-80% of the coffee sold in the US. That doesn’t mean I’m unaware that these are more diversified companies; I was simply pointing out that in terms of size and clout within the coffee biz, Starbucks — which I believe makes up 1-2% of the coffee trade — is not the biggest.

Yes, I agree that Starbucks’ decisions, simply due to its size, have bigger impacts than those of smaller companies. But I’m bothered by your willingness to “lower the bar,” in a way, for bigger companies, simply because their tiny decisions may have bigger impacts due to scale. The bigger the company, the less % of socio-environmental consciousness needed?

When you compare apples with apples and look at sales from coffee-related operations, I doubt if Kraft, P&G, and Nestle compare as “domestic” competitors; it’s like comaparing GE with Nortel Networks because they both produce electronic products for retail sale.

Secondly, the other companies cited (FB, GM, etc.) pale in comparison to the operating revenues with which to “contribute” to anything. For example, today’s operating income for Farmer Bros. is ($2,965M), Diedrich is ($9,029M), and Caribou is ($4,062M) - all losses. Nothing there to support Fair Trade of anything.

Diedrich (as of this morning) trades under the symbol DDRX and has none of Starbucks executives listed anywhere on its insider list. Where do you find the information suggesting Starbucks owns Diedrich?

Sara Lee is a food products corporation that sells coffee under the “Superior Coffee” label. That, I believe, is a wholesale distributorship, not retail sales to the consumer.

Green Mountain has operating income of $18M compared with $800M for Starbucks.

Now really, Siel, who do you think is doing more for Fair Trade? If Green Mountain contributes 5% of EBITDA to Fair Trade and Starbucks contributes 1%. who’s doing more good? The $8M from Starbucks or the $900K from Green Mountain?

Oh, but if you want to play activist, you shout “Lookie, lookie, Starbucks contributes a far less percentage of their operating revenues than does company A, B, or C.

Again…get away from the emotion and engage this audience with supportable data.

No other company meets those 2 criteria. Some never really use fair trade / sustainable issues to improve their image (Peets, Farmers Bros, etc). Others actually make consistent strides toward improving fair trade commitments (Green Mountain, etc). Among larger companies, Starbucks talks the talk without walking the walk. Diedrich stores were bought up by Starbucks, BTW.

Also — Starbucks is not the biggest coffee company, so if size is all activists cared about, they wouldn’t go after Starbucks. Kraft, Nestle, P&G and Sara Lee are the “big four” — much bigger than Starbucks.

This kind of pressure (and press) seems socially responsible on the surface, but it loses its credibility when its directed only toward the largest company and not all companies at the same time. In other words, the stock value of the other competitors isn’t harmed as long as the protests attack Starbucks and leave everyone else alone. If the unfair trade practices exist within the Industry, then the protests should be directed against the Industry…not just the largest company within the Industry. I happen to believe that either all companies are innocent or they are all guilty.

What do you think?

Also, I do agree that if this entire issue is to be credible over the long-term, somebody needs to get out and investigate what happens to all of the money as it flows from the U.S. market and out to the farmers. I would like to know the percentage of funds that are siphoned off by governments and middlemen, who specifically these intermediaries are by name, and what percent of each dollar actually is placed into the creased, wrinkled hands of the poor farmer. I am seeking more fact, and less emotion.

Fair trade has VERY STRONG environmental standards — and those standards are MANDATORY, not optional. Fair trade also offers a financial incentive for organic certification, which is why about 80% of fair trade coffee in the US is also organic certified. If you’re not aware of this, then you may wanna slog through the FLO documents, not just Starbucks’ docs.

I appreciate the viewpoint you’re bringing here, as someone who’s done a lotta research on Starbucks. But my main concern is that Starbucks is promoting standards that are socio-environmentally weaker than fair trade — yet the mermaid’s marketing it as something that does MORE than fair trade — a strategy that seems to have convinced you, at least in terms of the environmental issues.

Yes, fair trade certification for coffee only allows for fair trade co-ops — something many Starbucks peeps name as an excuse for not doing more fair trade. But my point is — if Starbucks was employing CAFE practices, but also working to up its fair trade commitment, there’d be no backlash against Starbucks from fair trade activists.

The fact remains that the vast majority of coffee in the world is grown by small-scale growers. By further supporting fair trade, Starbucks could make a bigger difference in the lives of more coffee farmers (hopefully before they’re forced off their land, selling their plots to large estates). That’s not to say worker conditions on estates don’t matter — but I hope you can understand many activists’ frustration at Starbucks portraying this as an either-or issue.

After all, serious activists know that an immediate 100% conversion to fair trade is literally not possible for Starbucks at this point. But that’s not what we’re asking from Starbucks. We’re currently asking for a 5% minimum (a far cry from 100%), considering that the mermaid’s already been on the fair trade roster for 6 years.

That 5% is hardly a lot to ask, considering all the positive press Starbucks has gotten due to its alleged “commitment to fair trade” it announces all over its press releases. We’re just asking Starbucks to do the minimum to walk its talk.

While it is generally agreed upon that companies’ own codes of conduct are somehow less legitimate that NGO certification schemes, I must repeat that Starbucks has hired a third-party verifier. SCS doesn’t make the rules, but they oversee the verification process (i.e. they find and “accredit” verifiers from organisations in the producing countries). How is this any less legitimate (in terms of ensuring compliance and integrity of the standards) than the FLO certification process?

Another thing to point out in favour of company-based codes of conduct is that Starbucks sources from a whole range of farm sizes and supply chain configurations. Fair Trade standards are only geared towards farms of a certain size in a “cooperative” configuration - best suited to coops in Latin America. Even a farm that employs one single worker is ineligible for Fair Trade certification - Starbucks sources from many medium-sized and large plantations, so they could never use Fair Trade certification on all their suppliers, even if they wanted to (which I think we can all agree, they don’t want to). Developing their own code of conduct based on the size and needs of their “myriad” of suppliers makes sense in that no previously existing certification scheme would work to verify the standards they want to verify. I think that “slogging through the documents” has definately revealed that Starbucks and their partners have done a lot of work since the Pilot Program to make the standards relevant and appropriate to farms of all sizes.

Also, you will notice that C.A.F.E practices have a heavy emphasis on environmental standards - this is partly due to the origins of the code in the partnership with Conservation International. Fair Trade certification, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t place this kind of emphasis on environmental standards.

To your earlier comment that there are not enough “disqualifiers” in the code (i.e. there are not many standards that disqualify a producer from “passing the test”), you will also have read that part of being a preferred supplier is the expectation of improving your score from year to year. This means that these farmers can be ‘in the club’ even though they’re not perfect, but membership in the club means working toward improving. This doesn’t totally make up for the lack of ‘disqualifiers’, but in my opinion, might be more effective in the long run in getting more farmers on board and helping them to improve gradually.

I agree that the best way to find out if the program actually achieves its goal of improving farmer livelihoods is to actually visit these C.A.F.E. farms and compare them to other cerfied farms (organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, etc).

One more thing: as we all know, let’s not forget Starbucks has a real stake in making their C.A.F.E. program succeed - they have stated publicly their goals for 60% participation by 2007. They have invested a lot of time, money and PR into this effort. They are under intense scrutiny by NGOs and also by the rest of the coffee industry, to see if the program is a success. Is this easier than “just buying Fair Trade”? I’ll leave that up to those of you who think sourcing 300 million pounds of Fair Trade coffee per year is easy.

All sarcasm aside, I think we all have to acknowledge that the question of standards in the coffee industry is complex. It’s not good to be too tunnel-visioned about one set of standards to the exclusion of all others. I don’t know where ’standards’ in the coffee industry are headed in the future (will one set of standards win out over another? Will it be Fair Trade or Organic? Rainforest Alliance or Utz Kapeh? Will the entire industry adopt the “4C” code? Will it be up to each company to adopt its own Supplier Code?)… but it will sure be a wild ride!

Meaning that for a lot of Starbucks’ coffee, FARMERS didn’t see anything close to $1.20. Starbucks, as it admitted in its letter to the Starbucks Challenge, doesn’t yet have transparency clauses for 41% of its coffee, meaning they have no idea what farmers get.

Now while I might agree that hey, at least they’re moving it the right direction, the statement above — especially in the context of a statement about fair trade — makes it seem like all Starbucks farmers are already getting a damn good deal, when that’s v. far from the truth. Starbucks also trains its baristas to say that all their coffee’s “fairly traded” — another half-lie.

If Starbucks were simply honest and open about where they are, I’d be more on their side. The same goes for Starbucks’ pointing fingers at fair trade certification’s limited reach, which I talked about here.

Meaning — One can’t assume that “all the stuff above” is true.