"Organic" and "Fair Trade" Difference Explained

The best of both worlds are Organic AND Fair Trade Certifications. Learn why from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters as Melissa McGinnis from Greenopolis TV interviews Paul Comey in beautiful Waterbury, Vermont at a historic train station built in the 1800s which now houses the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters cafe. Paul is the VP of Internal Affairs and these guys are making great changes!

Fair Trade talks about practices with the farmer in the fact that they got a fair wage for their coffee. Fair trade came about because for a long time coffee has been sold to less than a cost to produce- now that's not very sustainable. So if you're talking about sustainability then you need to pay a fair wage. If you think of the supply chain, how sustainable is your business going to be if you're paying less than what it costs to produce your coffee? So fair trade is all about the fair wage.

Organic is all about the way the coffee is grown - a lack of pesticides and a lack of chemicals. So for a farmer to go organic, there is a three year period where can't apply any pesticide or herbicides to their crop before they can get certified as organic. And then they can start to get the difference of organic product. Now there are some co-ops that do organic and fair trade. They are the kind where you get the best of both worlds. You can be sure that the farmers get fair wage and the coffee is grown organic. 

Their cups used to be coated with a petroleum-based product and we took that petroleum-based product and substituted it with a plant-based product, so now the cup is coated with a substance called PLA (polylactic acid) which means the entire cup, the paper cup and the coating inside all came from a renewable resource. So you can feel good about using this paper cup because it comes from a renewable resource. And what they also did was took the plastic lid, which used to be made with petroleum, and switched to having it made of the same polylactic acid as the cup. So as a package, you can say that this entire package comes from a renewable resource.