After meeting with Lore, hospitality services rep at USC, a couple weeks ago, we sent a letter detailing our efforts to make fair trade coffee an option at the campus locations serving Starbucks coffee.

Not only did we send the letter, but we also got a bunch of vibrant and active student orgs to sign on: Oxfam-USC, SCALE (The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation), Environment First, and USC Volunteer Latin America.

And we got a quick response from the new director of hospitality services, John Thacker, who called last Friday to give us an update.

The good news: John says that fair trade coffee will be brewing at 2 of the most popular student coffee shops — Cafe 84 and Trojan Grounds — as of Jan. 8, 2007 — the first day of classes for USC’s spring semester.

The sorta-downside is that we’re not talking about a full-scale switch to fair trade coffee. Fair trade coffee will simply be offered as an option, avaliable to students who request it.

So of course, we asked if there will be signage letting students know about the avaliability of fair trade coffee. John said that they’ll work on making some.

His main reservation about switching to fair trade entirely was the fact that he hadn’t tasted Starbucks’ fair trade coffee blend yet. Which made me bring up the fact that we students had organized a tasting for various Starbucks coffees — including Cafe Estima, the fair trade blend — in November 2005. Students even filled out surveys, and the fair trade coffee did quite well.

No, I had not heard about that, said John.

Hmm…. I certainly can’t blame John for not hearing about it — cuz he wasn’t even working for USC when it happened. But I’m quite miffed that others in the department — such as Lore, who got all of the tasting stats and such — didn’t bother to update John on the history of the issue.

After all, we’d brought up this issue to Lore just a couple weeks ago. In fact, Lore was in the room when we were talking to John on Friday, presumably on speaker phone. I can only guess at the convo that took place between them after the call.

In any case — We said that we’d let all the various student orgs know about the latest developments, and encourage everyone to go order fair trade coffee at Trojan Grounds and Cafe 84 come spring. We also offered to help get the word out in other ways — Our phone lines are open….

Waiting for spring –

Update, 1/7/07: Check to see if Cafe 84 and Trojan Grounds are brewing fair trade coffee this spring semester.

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