Specialty Food Market Drives Social Justice
By Lorrie Baumann
Americans’ appetite for social justice as well as better food is paying premiums for farmers in developing countries. In its 2017 report on “Today’s State of the Industry,” the Specialty Food Association reported that in the United States, specialty food had grown into a $127 billion business, with a 15 percent jump in total sales between 2014 and 2016. By comparison, the growth rate for all food sales during the same period was just 2.3 percent.
Consumers are responding to brands that invest in social justice. According to a 2011 report on research by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the London School of Economics, “A majority of surveyed consumers claim to prefer ethically certified products over non-certified alternatives, and to be willing to pay a price premium for such products.” What that means for farmers around the world is that specialty food producers who command premium prices from American consumers are able to spread some wealth to the farmers providing their raw ingredients.
Under the brand The Ginger People, Abbie and Bruce Leeson produce a range of products that includes Arjuna Ginger Bites, Ginger Rescue Ginger Shots, Ginger Soother and Turmeric Latte Mix made from ginger grown in tropical areas around the world, including Fiji and Indonesia. The Leesons partner with groups of native farmers that grow the high-quality ginger they need as an ingredient for their products. Abbie is the company’s Brand Shepherd, and Bruce is its President.
In Indonesia, a farmers’ group in eastern Java formed a co-op to grow organic ginger for The Ginger People. “This is their first opportunity to enter the commercial market,” Bruce said. The Ginger People pays these farmers a premium price for the product that’s 15 percent more than the Fair Trade pricing plus 1 percent of revenue from product sales.
In its fifth year in Fiji, The Ginger People is the largest purchaser of ginger and now helps employ more than 100 people, including many women who are now able to pay school fees to educate their children. “This factory is helping them do that,” Bruce said. “We are a company that quietly goes about what we do. It’s not all about the money…. We now have a viable business partner, who with the additional support of Third World development organizations, is able to get the funding they need for better equipment. It’s a cycle of success.”
Ginger is an annual crop, planted every year in spring and harvested in autumn. In Fiji, that means the farmers plant in September and then harvest about half the crop in February. The rest of the ginger is left in the ground to continue growing for a later harvest of mature rhizomes with more fiber and spicier juice. The Ginger People is in the process of developing a juicing plant in Fiji to process that second crop, which will produce an ingredient for The Ginger People Turmeric and Ginger Shots.
“We are already getting limited quantities of turmeric and ginger from these farmers for our own brand, but next year, we’ll be able to buy from farmers for an extended period of February through November, so they have the opportunity for cash flow most of the year,” Bruce said.
Lisa Curtis was working as a Peace Corps volunteer in west Africa when she discovered the moringa tree, a deciduous tree native to the southern foothills of the Himalayas and widely cultimvated in tropical and subtropical areas around the world. Its leaves and young seed pods are widely used as vegetables, with the leaves being a significant source of B vitamins, vitamin C and K and other essential nutrients. “I started eating moringa for my own health,” she says. “The leaves have more nutrition than kale and are a complete protein. It wasn’t really eaten because it wasn’t being cultivated.”
When she asked local people why they weren’t cultivating and harvesting their moringa, they pointed out to there that they didn’t see a point, since they had no market for it. At the same time, interest in superfoods was exploding back home, and Curtis came back to the U.S. determined to help her African farmer friends, many of them women, take advantage of that. “I wanted to help those women get access to the American market and to improve their own nutrition as well,” she said. “Kuli Kuli’s mission is to improve nutrition and livelihood through nutrition-rich plants like moringa.”
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“We are now working with over 1,000 farmers, primarily small farmers, women’s co-ops and family farmers across 11 different countries in west Africa and South America,” she added. “We’ve planted over 1 million moringa trees. We’ve put close to $2 million back into these rural communities growing moringa.”
In the 4-1/2 years that Kuli Kuli has been on the market with its product line that now includes Moringa Superfood Bars, Pure Moringa Powder, Energizing Moringa Herbal Tea, and Moringa Green Energy shots, Kuli Kuli’s farmers have scaled up their production and are finding ways to include moringa into school feeding programs to improve their community’s nutrition. “We have found that, for the majority of our farmers, moringa is their most profitable crop, more than millet or corn or whatever else they’re growing,” Curtis said. “They’ve used that money to send their kids to school, to buy medicine for their families. In surveys, they say they’ve increased their own consumption of moringa.”
For craft chocolate maker TCHO, investing in cacao farmers pays dividends in higher-quality cocoa beans for the company’s chocolate bars as well as to farmers who get a premium price for their better beans, according to TCHO Chief Chocolate Maker Brad Kintzer and Laura Sweitzer, who manages the TCHO Source Program. “When we’re able to work together to understand all aspects of cocoa quality, there are two benefits: one, the cocoa farmers are able to increase the value of their cocoa, and second, that we’re able to get a consistent supply of great cocoa, which increases the quality of our chocolate,” Kintzer said.
The company works with farmers in various cocoa-growing regions around the world but found, initially that the farmers who were growing the beans didn’t have the equipment or training to evaluate the flavor or quality of their beans– they were simply selling them as a commodity, almost never having tasted the final chocolate product. TCHO wanted to produce chocolates that highlighted the wide range of flavors inherent to cocoa beans, such as berries, nuts, and citrus, but the cacao farmers who’d never really tasted chocolate didn’t know how to produce and select for the flavor characteristics that TCHO was seeking. “For the sourcing process, we would call up the co-op and ask for a fruity flavor profile. They’d send samples, and we’d taste them and reject nine out of ten,” Sweitzer said. “Very inefficient.”
The company responded by developing TCHO flavor labs, small bean-to-bar chocolate making labs, and training farmers to manufacture chocolate in small scale from their cocoa beans, so that they can test samples of their beans to make chocolate they can taste. That gives them the information they need to evaluate their beans, to compare quality in different lots and even to experiment with growing methods. “Right where the farmers are growing the cocoa, they’re better able to understand the quality of the cocoa,” Kintzer said. “This was something that had never been done before in the chocolate world.”
“When a co-op has a TCHO flavor lab, they can conduct regular experiments with their production. For example, segregating and processing one batch versus mixing with producers a few miles away. What would happen if they just pick a certain varietal?” Sweitzer explained. “It really allows them to deconstruct a lot of the harvesting and processing steps and determine how those affect flavor. It’s giving farmers the tools to be cocoa scientists, they even share a lot of this information with TCHO. We’re learning much of this information for the first time as they execute these experiments and share the results with us.”
The farmers benefit from this deepened understanding of their product by commanding a higher price for a higher quality product. “It’s very empowering for farmers to understand the quality of the product they’re offering, and it gives them a stronger position at the buyer’s table,” Sweitzer said. “These TCHO labs allow them to taste all of their product offerings and strategically segment them for their different buyers, regions, and applications. As a result of the labs and trainings, our producer partners truly understand what characteristics TCHO is looking for in cacao beans. Today, we rarely reject samples from these groups. This efficiency allows TCHO to pay a very nice quality premium for the beans they send us.”
TCHO has directly installed 10 of these flavor labs, comprised of simple equipment that can be maintained locally, and the number has grown to more than 35 in Latin America alone as other cocoa co-ops have visited the TCHO flavor labs and taken the concept home with them. Seven farmer co-ops working with TCHO in Peru, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic have received more than $5 million in premiums specifically for quality since they started training with TCHO and tasting their beans, according to Sweitzer. “That doesn’t even count Fair Trade or organic, [for which separate premiums are paid]” she said. “We’re just talking about the money specifically for quality.”
“The TCHO Source Program is the heartbeat of TCHO to ensure that TCHO can get the high-quality cocoa we need and to ensure that our producer partners get the price they need and the tools they need to innovate. It’s putting tools at origin to create the best quality cacao beans possible,” Kintzer said. “When you close the gaps between the manufacturer and the farmers, both sides benefit tremendously. They learn so much from us, and we learn a lot from them, and then we’re both positioned to become better businesses.”
