By: Akhila Vijayaraghavan Chocolate like coffee is a multi-billion dollar industry. It is also provides some very important CSR and sustainability issues for companies that deal with chocolate. Chocolate has its origins with the cacao tree, native to Central and South America. Today however, about 70% of the world’s cacao is grown in Africa. The history of chocolate goes back to the [...]
By: Gillian Marks I was steered to Kickstarter.com by an entrepreneurial minded friend. While browsing the site I happened upon an interesting story. Danny Jacobs, now 30, grew up in southern California, the son of a father who stressed that financial and business success were the true measure of a man. Thus, after graduating from a prestigious university, he launched a series [...]
By: Leslie Berliant I have been cooking, baking and candy making for as long as I can remember. From the time I started kindergarten, sometime around the middle of November, my mother would come in my room in the morning, feel my forehead, proclaim that I was too sick to go to school and for the next week I [...]
As I write this I have a double batch of brownies baking in the oven. Nothing, after all, is better than a batch of fresh baked brownies…nothing, perhaps, except said brownies couched under a hefty scoop of vanilla ice cream and double whipped cream. Unfortunately, the key ingredient in brownies – chocolate -has a distinctly unsustainable source flying strongly in [...]
By: Julie Fahnestock Part 2 of a multi-series post The majority of consumers who consider themselves “ethical shoppers” are most likely to be familiar with the term, “fair trade.” An ethical consumer is also likely to know about the history of exploitation of small farmers behind the coffee, bananas, sugar and tea industries. The average, ethical consumer, however, is unlikely [...]
In 1999 the US Department of Labor issued Executive Order 13126. “Prohibition of Acquisition of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor,” was signed on June 12, 1999. The EO is intended to ensure that federal agencies enforce laws relating to forced or indentured child labor in the procurement process. It requires the Department of Labor, in consultation with the Departments [...]
By: Robin Rossmanith Having a fair trade Christmas is one of the most significant things a concerned consumer can do when it comes to respecting the earth and all its people. Fair trade is a certification given to goods and products that have been produced without doing harm to the environment or to people. Your choosing to have a fair [...]
Continued from Part One Photo Credit, Arvind Balaraman Looking at two highly traded commodities, coffee and cocoa, we can see how the profit-only mindset can cause a crisis in the lives of the raw material producers and the countries they live in. Coffee is one of the world’s most traded commodities, and has been since the 1800’s. Entire communities in [...]
by Stephanie Love I once watched a DVD about two men taken out of slavery in cocoa farms in West Africa. These men, who had welts all over their bodies, told the journalists interviewing them that they hate anyone who has ever eaten chocolate, because when they are eating chocolate “they are eating my flesh.” Knowing that slaves were – [...]
