Nowadays, many of us look for our consumer products to be vegan, organic, paraben-free – as well as fairly traded – and do our best to make ethical purchases wherever possible. But while conscious consumers make up a much larger portion of the buying power than ever before, the ten largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies also control a larger part of the market than ever. Amidst an escalating climate crisis, a widening wealth gap and a global pandemic, Mia Tagg talks to Traidcraft’s Matt Oliver about fair trade, getting into good trouble and making capitalism fair.

In 2018 Traidcraft PLC found itself on the brink of collapse. After prolific growth and achievements in its first two decades, the 2000s and 2010s had been very difficult. “We hadn’t made a profit for ten years”, Matt tells me as we talk about how they have built themselves back up over the last two years. “Traidcraft had just become prolific starters of anything to do with Fair Trade; fair trade wine, fair trade cotton, fair trade rubber, we thought we had to do it all”, which had spread the company and its resources very thin. “We wanted to get back to our founder, Richard Adam’s roots, which was to be a disruptor, challenging big business and maybe even challenge what we perceive to be fair trade.”

So, what is fair trade?

Post-WW2, the accelerating decolonisation of former European territories had left behind exploitative structures of production in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East. Structures that were quickly taken over by private interests as the various colonial powers withdrew. Whereas governmental structures of empire were dismantled, many Christian missions remained in communities around the world. They witnessed continued – and often worsened – conditions for producers of goods under this new private stewardship. In an effort to support equality and economic emancipation in the communities they serve, these religious organisations gave rise to the fair trade movement. The first fair trade products available in the UK were sold at stalls in church halls, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that many of the ground-breaking fair trade groups like Traidcraft, have faith-based origins.

The global fair trade movement was founded on ‘Trade, Not Aid’, a strategy based on the idea that if developing countries were able to trade more freely with wealthy countries, they would have more reliable incomes and they would be much less dependent on external aid to carry out development projects. Traidcraft is one of many fair trade organisations across the world, and certainly the UK’s most well-known, and has arguably become synonymous with the fair trade movement and the Fairtrade mark here.

Traidcraft was founded by Richard Adams in 1979. With six members of staff and headquarters in a 1920s warehouse in the centre of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, it produced its first, hand-drawn retail catalogue; primarily for the sale of jute products from Bangladesh, where Richard Adams had witnessed the devastation wreaked by widespread flooding throughout the 1970s.

By 1985 Traidcraft had introduced the first fairly traded tea, coffee, sugar and chocolate to the UK, established the Traidcraft Educational Fund, moved across the Tyne to Gateshead and become a Public Limited Company. Traidcraft kicked off the1990s by playing a crucial role in setting up an ethical lending company, Shared Interest, and introducing the first Fair Trade product to UK supermarkets, Cafédirect coffee. Traidcraft also played a role in establishing the European Fair Trade Association (EFTA) and by the mid 1990s, Traidcraft had come into its own as a true business innovator, being the first PLC in the UK to produce a set of social accounts alongside its financial reporting. Traidcraft is also an e-commerce pioneer, launching traidcraft.co.uk in 1994.

In 1992 Traidcraft co-founded the Fairtrade Foundation, along with five other organisations. The foundation licenses the use of the Fairtrade mark in the UK; a system of labelling that has played a pivotal role in establishing reliable signposts for ethically minded consumers and supported farmers, workers and artisans in establishing sustainable practises in some of the world’s poorest, most politically volatile and environmentally precarious places. Over 4,500 fair trade products are currently available in the UK and include footballs, gold and vodka – as well as tea, coffee, chocolate and bananas.

The Fairtrade mark has been a huge success, it is estimated that 93% of shoppers in the UK recognise the label and have an understanding of what it represents. In fact, a product with the Fairtrade mark champions women’s work and environmentally sustainable practices, as well as promoting financial resilience, fighting inequality and reaching into areas other businesses won’t go. So, whereas other product labelling, such as organic and vegan products, have an important role to play; they do not necessarily guarantee ethical or fair production and trade.

To a certain extent fair trade fell victim to the success of the Fairtrade mark. Matt tells me that “the dream was that once supermarkets adopted fair trade, that they would see the benefit of it and want to be totally fair trade” – getting fair trade products onto supermarket shelves became central to Traidcraft aims in the 1990s and 2000s. Many positive changes were made, supermarkets began stocking fair trade items and many companies signed up to the Fairtrade Foundation’s certification criteria. However, FMCGs and supermarkets have capitalised on the fair trade success by creating their own, in-house, loosely applied, accreditation criteria, leaving conscious consumers fatigued and bamboozled.

In the 2000s and 2010s, greenwashing was accompanied with massive corporate boycotts of brands like Innocent, Cadbury’s and Kit-Kat, respectively acquired up by FMCG giants Coca-Cola, Mondalez (formerly Kraft Foods) and Nestlé, who all brought their ethical practices to a halt, or introduced their own, much looser, standards. A double whammy of set-backs for fair trade organisations like Traidcraft saw both Tesco and Sainsbury’s pulled out of their deals, with a view to run their own fair trade ranges. What had started as a mutually beneficial trade agreement with supermarkets, had become an untenable competition for Traidcraft. Traidcraft’s CEO, Robin Roth is quoted in How To: Be More Pirate: “… it is harder to be passionate about fair trade when even the most frequently boycotted and despised food multi-nationals have their token range of ethical products on the shelves...”

The Brexit vote landed a further blow to Traidcraft, and when Theresa May claimed that “no deal is better than a bad deal” in the summer of 2018, the pound plummeted again and the threat to Traidcraft’s existence became immediate and radical action acutely necessary. The team rallied and took inspiration from, amongst other things, Sam Conniff’s book Be More Pirate (see page 55) and identified that its focus on growth had diluted the central aims and function of Traidcraft – it had lost its role as disruptor and had become trapped in futile contest with supermarkets and FMGCs, instead of being a challenger brand.

On his appointment as CEO of Traidcraft in 2016, Roth released Traidcraft Exchange from Traidcraft PLC. “There was a real blurring of the lines between the charity and the business. Separating them exposed the PLC,” Matt tells me as he walks me through the traumatic process of starting over. Traidcraft had become big, complicated and difficult to explain. In its mission to make fair trade products available to the mass market, the company had plateaued and lost focus and a clear identity. In order to regain focus, the team returned to the aims if its founder, Richard Adams. “Making capitalism fair,” Matt continues, “by creating a premium fair trade business that is available online, we’ll support and work with local retailers who share our vision and building a tribe of conscious consumers…” The journey has not been easy and Traidcraft has made some hard decisions: In the run-up to Christmas 2018, there were 95 members of staff working at Traidcraft. When Matt returned in January 2019, there were seven full-time staff left.

“The hardest thing in all of this was deciding what not to do,” Matt tells me when I ask about the wider effects of this radical process and the implications for Traidcraft’s producing partners. Honouring the commitment to them was central to both the original and new vision for Traidcraft. Fast-moving consumer goods like tea and coffee could still be bought directly. However, buying craft items in bulk directly from artisans was no longer a financial option for Traidcraft. “These are people Traidcraft has worked closely with for 20 or 30 years, and that has been heart-breaking,” Matt adds.

Fortunately, one of the original principles of Traidcraft was that no producer should be solely dependent on them for trade and had worked diligently to create a robust network in the fair trade supply chain. Because of the spirit of collaboration that never wavered, Traidcraft was able to continue buying these craft items indirectly through its partners in the British Association of Fair Trade Shops and Suppliers.

Traidcraft hasn’t just changed the way it does business with others, it has fundamentally changed its governance – moving away from a traditional hierarchy to a ‘holacracy’. A decentralised management and organisational system that allowed Traidcraft to respond quickly to the demands of lockdown, teams have the authority to respond to need without seeking approval from the traditional chain of command. Coupled with the legacy of Traidcraft’s long-established website, the agile new management structure ensured that Traidcraft was able to respond to lockdown within a couple of days, able to sell pasta and toilet paper when the big supermarkets’ shelves were empty. “Our biggest challenges are still to come,” says Matt. “It is difficult to separate the effects Covid from Brexit at the moment.” While this is true, Traidcraft has weathered the shock of both, and at its most vulnerable too.

Researching this piece, I began to notice changes in the rhetoric from Traidcraft around the same time that they found themselves in crisis: “When you come so close to not existing, and then you get a second chance, you think – what can hurt me now?” Matt says, as I ask him about where this new bravery comes from. Traidcraft and the fair trade movement as a whole, have gained a refreshing irreverence and fearlessness – using language much more reminiscent of social justice, gender equality and environmental movements. It is fighting talk, and central to Traidcraft’s resurgence is fighting for equality, not just politely supporting it, as Roth told Sam Conniff and Alex Barker from Be More Pirate: “… we are openly, noisily passionate about equality: gender, sex, religion, regardless of background, heritage, experience or inheritance. However, it’s possible to be in agreement with all of this but it is quite a different thing to fight for it.”

Traidcraft is fighting for it. All power to them.