You might be wondering where last week's installment of Sweetery was. It was on hiatus. Back soon with new sweet stories. Need to hone my fact checking skills. Plenty of treats to dish about though.
Instead this week, I interviewed the folks who make Cocoa Camino products. I tried one of their chocolate bars and was very impressed with the taste. It rivals any fine chocolate on the market. The one difference is that theirs is a certified organic fair trade product ; and seeing as I brought up the subject of the fair trade movement in the first Sweetery, I thought it a good idea to interview a company that makes fair trade sweets .
Q: What is Cocoa Camino?
A: La Siembra Co-operative markets all its fair trade certified and organic certified products under the brand name of Cocoa Camino. The word "camino" means path in Spanish, so Cocoa Camino means the "Cocoa Path". The name was chosen to demonstrate that La Siembra is creating a new path, one that reconnects consumers with the producers who grow and harvest the ingredients for our products. This connection is very important to us, since our goal is to ensure that our trading relations contribute to improving the quality of life of our producer partners and their families through our Fair Trade and co-operative business model.
Q: Who started Cocoa Camino and when?
A: La Siembra Co-operative was created in 1999 by three friends working in international development. These founders agreed from the very first that they would establish a fair trade business that would operate as a worker-owned co-operative. They wanted to embrace the same democratic and transparent co-operative model that empowers the producers involved in fair trade, and they wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to achieve business success while adhering to fair trade priciples. They investigated a number of business ideas, and identified a market niche for fair trade, organic hot chocolate. In the beginning, they produced all the hot chocolate themselves, working in the basement of First United Church after completing their day jobs. The hot chocolate was marketed under the brand name of Cocoa Camino. However, with the growth of this project, the founders soon realized that they needed more support, and transitioned the ownership of the business to two new worker-owners, Jeff de Jong and Kevin Thomson, who maintained the worker co-op model and fair trade business practices and who repositioned La Siembra's business model around fair trade chocolate. ...
You will find our brand name Cocoa Camino on all our products. Our chocolate bars, hot chocolate mixes, cocoa powder, chocolate chips, and sugar can be found in supermarkets, health food stores and cafes.
Q: How did the partnership between farmers and fair trade start?
A: ...The main ingredient in (our) hot chocolate , organic cocoa, was first sourced from a co-operative in Costa Rica. From the very start, we wanted to develop trading relationships that adhered to the principles of Fair trade and that supported the development and empowerment of producer co-operatives. The priciples of fair trade are:
* Guaranteeing fair prices to producers;
* Paying premiums to improve social conditions in producer communities;
* Paying producers in advance to assist in long-term planning and pre-harvest financing;
* Supporting democratic participation in farmer-owner co-operatives;
* Ensuring that there is no forced labour;
* Supporting sustainable farming practices.
Today, we continue to follow the principles of fair trade as we source our cocoa from producer co-operatives in the Dominican Republic (CONACADO), Peru (CACVRA), and most recently Panama (COCABO).
Q: The sugar and cocoa are from farms in South America but the products are manufactured in Canada?
A: At the moment, we work with producer partners in the Caribbean, Central and South America, as well as manufacturers in Europe and North America ... We also source our sugar from Paraguay and Costa Rica. Our chocolate bars are manufactured in Europe, our chips are manufactured in the US, and our hot chocolate and chocolate syrup are made in Ontario, while the milk used in our hot chocolates comes from Organic Meadows, a Canadian farmer co-operative. We have chosen a family-owned business in Switzerland to manufacture our bars in order to offer consumers the highest quality Fair Trade Certified and certified organic products.
However, in the long term and as our capacity increases and more manufacturing options become available, we are interested in increasing the amount of manufacturing that takes place both in Canada and in producer countries.
END.
La Siembra Co-operative is located in Ottawa, Canada. Tel: 613-235-6122, fax: 613-235-6877
www.lasiembra.com
www.cocoacamino.com
Pinkgrapefruit
30% fun, 70% conscientious, or
30% conscientious, 70% fun
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment