16 Denton Business Chronicle
August 2014
Business Spotlight TRADE | CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6
“We keep getting requests from stores every week, but we can’t keep up with the demand,” says Denby. While fair trade represents a growing opportunity for small businesses, it is still a tiny part of the market for food and clothing. U.S. supermarkets had $620 billion in sales in 2013, according to the Food Marketing Institute, a trade group for the supermarket industry. Shoppers are more likely to find fair trade items online or in stores that specialize in organic or natural foods — in the coffee aisle at a Manhattan grocery store, just two out of 130 brands and roasts had fair trade labels. The growth in fair trade products has been helped the last few years by the recovering economy. Shoppers aren’t as concerned about frugality as they were during the recession, says Winer, the NYU professor.
“In a recession, private labels start to sell better and many products that are trying to get a premium for socially responsible behavior are squeezed a bit,” he says. His study says the average premium, or price increase, on fair trade products is 17 percent. Although Erin Meagher pays about 4 percent extra for fair trade coconut oil, that hasn’t hurt sales of her products, sold under the name Kelapo. They rose 132 percent in 2013 after climbing 258 percent in 2012. Meagher expects another triple-digit gain this year for her Tampa, Floridabased business. Meagher says she could make more money with oil that isn’t fair trade but she believes in being socially responsible. “We’re not going to trade that off for the extra little bitty profits we would make,” she says. Staff writer Jenna Duncan contributed to this report.
Photo by Inti Ocon/Getty Images
Coffee grower Gloria Balladares shows a diseased coffee plant Feb. 26 near Somoto, Nicaragua. The United States announced in May a $5 million effort to fight coffee rust, which has been savaging Central America’s fair trade coffee beans. The U.S. Agency for International Development formed a partnership with Texas A&M University’s World Coffee Research institute to eliminate coffee rust and shore up farmers’ livelihoods.
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