Is Love Tea Fairtrade?

IS LOVE TEA FAIRTRADE?

We fairly source the majority of our ingredients directly from the growing communities and cooperatives who produce them. We pay fair trade premiums for the ingredients purchased from fair trade farms and continually strive to learn more about the challenges that the growers face in their regions.

There are 2 main components to being fair trade certified

(1) Premiums
Premiums are an additional percentage, that you pay as a customer, that goes directly into a community run trust account, for the community to use on particular projects that they vote to be of most importance. These could be water wells, community halls, delivery vehicles etc. This is in addition to the per kg / per unit cost of any goods purchased.

(2) Licence Fee
Licence fees are paid directly to the parent organisation, in this case, Fairtrade, as a fee for using their mark to promote products. These fees don’t assist lowest paid workers in countries abroad but a more of a fee for use of their logo.

We have decided to pay the premiums to producers of our ingredients at an above-market “fair trade” premium at farm level. For farms to receive the premium they must meet specific labour, environmental and production standards that are audited by Fairtrade international. We believe this is the best way to empower growers and drive the sustainable development of the industry around the world. We have been lucky enough to see first hand some of the benefits to communities these premiums supply and we are really proud of our decision.

After a lot of thought, we have chosen to not proceed with the Fairtrade Licensing due to a number of factors including tight restrictions on where and at what size we would need to place the logo on our packaging and what the contribution would do to benefit farmers at origin.