Coming to the grocery shelf: fair-trade food

Then, one day while shopping at her local grocery store, she spotted a fair-trade logo on a Divine chocolate bar, which is made from premium cocoa in Ghana and costs about 85 cents for a 1.5-ounce bar.

"Now I treat myself to it about once a month," she says. "I am the type of person who notices a price difference of even 10 cents, but I justify the extra expense to buy fair trade because so often we don't know anything about the people providing our food, and this is one way to establish that relationship."

Fair-trade products can be expensive, but the higher price can be misleading, says Rodney North, spokesman for Equal Exchange, the leading US fair-trade importer.

"There's a real misconception out there that something has to cost more just because it is fair trade," he explains. "But you have to compare apples to apples. Fair-trade products are often organic or fit into the specialty food category, and when you compare them to others in those categories they are similarly priced or even cheaper."

A look at the grocery shelves supports that assertion. Peach Oo-la-long, which launched in February of this year as the first fair-trade-certified bottled tea, ranges in price from $1.29 to $1.49 and on average costs 20 cents more than Snapple beverages. Compared with other organic bottled teas, however, Peach Oo-la-long sells for about the same price at an estimated 2,000 retail locations nationwide.

"Peach Oo-la-long has been our most successful product introduction to date, out of a total of 13 different tea varieties," says CEO Seth Goldman of Honest Tea, which controls about 60 percent of the organic tea market.

Despite its growth, the American fair-trade industry lags far behind Europe's. One in 5 bananas sold in Switzerland is fair trade, as is 14 percent of all ground coffee sold in England. The list of fair-trade labeled products in Europe includes rice, mangoes, sugar, fruit juices, and even soccer balls. Europeans have been made aware of such products thanks to government-sponsored education campaigns - something not found in the US.

"As of January 2003, only 6 percent of US consumers had heard of fair-trade coffee, and 2 percent had actually bought it," says Jay Molishever, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association. "Fair-trade coffee is a valid approach, but it is not the entire solution because the volume sold as a percent of the market is extremely low."

Regardless, fair-trade labeled products can be found in stores from Langdon, N.D., to Savannah, Ga., and consumers such as Janet Ranney, a clinical psychologist in Tucson, Ariz., are content to play even a small part. "When I walk into a new store I start looking around to see what they have that is fair-trade certified," she says." "It's just a little thing, and I'm just one person, but it is important for me to try to support something that's creating health and wellness in global villages."

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