South African Fair Trade Certified Winery

Where is your favorite Fair Trade product from? Fair Trade Certified products are sold by a variety of retailers, but every product also has a country of origin–and a cooperative of origin. Sometimes, this is explicitly stated on the product, and other times, it is not so clear.

One way to find out a product’s origin is to visit the manufacturer’s website. Some manufacturers give detailed profiles about the country where their product originates. Other times, however, a product will just inform you through the Fair Trade logo that it is Fair Trade Certified, but it won’t offer any more detailed information.

In these cases, you can always e-mail the manufacturer to find out more information about where the product you love so much comes from. Making this connection could be important for both you and the manufacturer, especially since producers lie at the heart of Fair Trade.

If all of those methods have been exhausted, the best way to get as close as possible to finding out the origin of a product is to visit the producer profile page on the TransFair USA website. This offers a list of all of the cooperatives responsible for producing particular products, the country that these cooperatives are in, and a link to more detailed information about each cooperative.

So, while you might not know the precise origin of your Fair Trade banana just from the logo sticker placed on it, you know from the producer profiles that your banana comes from either Colombia or the Dominican Republic. Looking through the different descriptions of the cooperatives from these countries, it’s easy to discover the impact that the purchasing of Fair Trade bananas has had on members of these cooperatives.

Let us know where your favorite Fair Trade product is from by tweeting its origin @FairTradeUSA, or by posting what you’ve found on the Fair Trade Facebook page.

A Fair Trade Certified wine producer in South Africa