Food Ethics
When deciding which companies to do business with we carefully take into account our own core values:
- social justice
- providing local, organic, and healthy foods
- transparency and openness
- environmental sustainability
We believe it is important to make sure that the values of the companies we order from run parallel to our own core values. We do our best to look for companies that are conscientious towards and take responsibility for the quality of their products, the well-being of people, and the well-being of the environment. How do we find these companies?
We conduct company research. We go by the initial simple rule: the more information the better. If companies are doing things to be proud of, they will more than likely have no problem disclosing information. Being built on a foundation of autonomy and transparency, cooperatives apply to this rule well. Since we are a cooperative ourselves we have a natural positive bias towards other cooperatives. For example, if we are trying to decide between two ethically similar breads of similar quality, one of them made by a cooperative and the other by a corporation, we will more often than not choose the one made by a cooperative. However, that does not go to say we have a negative bias against corporations. Corporations have just as much of an opportunity to openly make information available to the public and to their employees. When they take advantage of that opportunity, we acknowledge and respect that.
What kind of information are we even talking about? Something we specifically look for is if the company is certified by any outside third parties. For example, if the company claims they produce organic products they will have to be certified by a legitimate third party certifier with its own set of organic standards. There are many different types of third party recognition we look for: organic, fair-trade, non-GMO, humane animal treatment, food safety. We go as far as seeing whether a company’s headquarters is a certified green building or not. Another piece of information we seek is the company’s source of ingredients. Due to privacy matters, most companies cannot share exactly what farms their ingredients come from. This is understandable but also can act as an excuse to be as general as possible. There are companies that strive to be as specific as possible while still protecting the farmer’s privacy. The more specific a company is about their ingredient source the better. In markets where the fairness of trading may be in question, such as coffee and chocolate markets, fair-trade certified companies will often allow full traceability of ingredients. For example, this coffee bean came exactly from this farmer. This allows full accountability to insure those farmers in those markets are receiving proper returns on their products. By finding out if a company has any parent companies or sister companies we avoid larger corporations that have consolidated many smaller companies. When we refer to “large corporations” we are referring to mega-corporations that have annual revenues reaching upwards to the billions. With the growing demand for organic food, consolidation has become commonplace in the organic food industry. Consolidation centralizes decision making. With mega-corporations demanding organic products and subsequently less people making decisions, organic farming operations thus become large scaled and the organic food standard universally drops. This inevitably leads to the quality of food universally dropping. We do not support this. Other information we look for is the source of labor and number of employees a company has. When investigating the source of labor we focus on two things: the location of processing factories and the type of labor. Knowing where a product is processed can give us a better picture of a product’s travel miles. Knowing whether the workers are migrant workers, unionized, or what, can provide us with awareness to any potential human rights issues. Also, knowing how many employees work at a company gives a better idea of the nature of a company. For example, some companies we look into have 4 employees, some have 33,000. That number alone can be worth a thousand words.
Connecting the products on our shelves to our ethical standards is a never ending project. Every week we receive new products. Every day businesses are being bought out, organic standards changed, labels’ meanings changed, and so on. Because of this constant flux, attention to all of this can be demanding. We use a list of clear-cut goals to make the process easier.
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