I want to give my friend fair trade chocolate for her birthday… any stores in Taipei that sell it?
cheers
[quote=“overtheborder”]I want to give my friend fair trade chocolate for her birthday… any stores in Taipei that sell it?
cheers[/quote]
What is it? What exactly are the required criteria?
i have never seen any.
Maybe Dean and Delucca’s (sp.?) in the Breeze Center on Fuxing?
Or perhaps you can order some online and have it shipped here.
[quote=“overtheborder”]I want to give my friend fair trade chocolate for her birthday… any stores in Taipei that sell it?
cheers[/quote]
I know this is an old thread, but Dragonbabe bought some the other day at either Booday or Earthtree. If anyone’s still interested I can ask which one and get directions.
(Edit: Earthtree was the one.
earthtree.com.tw/index.htm)
Does it taste better than sweet sweat of slave driven chocolate?
[quote=“Mother Theresa”][quote=“overtheborder”]I want to give my friend fair trade chocolate for her birthday… any stores in Taipei that sell it?
cheers[/quote]
What is it? What exactly are the required criteria?[/quote]
Hehe…my friend came over from Europe and tried to get fair trade coffee a couple of years ago…he actually asked in English for a ‘fair trade cofee’…I was trying to explain to him the concept in Asia of fair trade which is…
I’ll give you a 100 for that. No way it’s worth at least 200. Ok give you 150…fair trade 
Actually there have been a couple of coffee shops starting to sell fair trade recently but it’s still a very foreign concept, as it should be in a relatively poor country.
Now if they sold the product at a cost close to a regular coffee and chocolate AND it was ethically produced…yes that is a fair trade.
There’s a little shop just south of Cello Pasta (south of Yongkang Park) that sells “fair trade” items. I know they have coffee; they might have chocolate.
It’s on the same side of the street as Cello Pasta, going south past the bagel shop. It’s next to a little cafe (, called the Door, I think).
I think you may be talking about Earthtree. I’ve not been there yet, but it’s near Yongkang park. I know they also sell organic, fair trade coffee, clothing, and [shameless self-promotional plug omitted]. Here’s an article on them:
taipeitimes.com/News/feat/ar … 2003452007
That’s it. Thanks for sharing the name of the shop and for posting the link to the TT article, Dragonbones.
Just curious–what was the [shameless self-promotional plug omitted]? Are you selling stuff there?
In any case, Earthtree is well worth a browse, if you happen to be in the area. Great food at Cello Pasta and Hui Liu nearby, as well.
masterful touch there, DB
Yeah, sorta – I put that in as a form of ‘full disclosure’. More for the purpose of supporting the fair-trade and organic concepts than for profit, Dragonbabe imports, sells online and distributes very small quantities of such items, including just a few (not chocolate) at that and another shop, which is how I know about some of the other items they sell there. She says Earthtree is a really neat store. I plan to stop in sometime soon, myself.
I think fair-trade products like this chocolate are a great idea, personally. I mean, people talk about goals like reducing or ending poverty, but how often do we ourselves lift a finger to help? Buying fair-trade chocolate is a fairly painless way to start.
Cadbury’s and Nestle are fair trade.
I can see why you might say that (the top one bar of each in your country is fair trade), and I’m sure they’d like you to believe that, but the truth AFAIK is a bit different:
A miniscule amount (less than 1%, I believe) of Nestle’s chocolate is fair trade. Their ploy is to to do a tiny amount of fair trade and to use this in their marketing to deflect attention from their scandals. While the UK Kitkat just recently switched to fair trade (early this year, I think), Nestle has no plans to make that switch in the other 69 countries where it sells this product, nor has it announced plans to make that switch for its other UK candy products (75% of its candy sales there), and the same goes for its other products elsewhere, so that would make “Nestle” overwhelmingly not fair trade. source
I think it is mostly cosmetic. For instance, it reportedly has a stake “in an independent supplier of Fairtrade chocolate and produces its own Fairtrade coffee”. source But that stake is small and incidental: It owns a little over a quarter of L’Oréal, which owns Body Shop, which happens to own a mere 14% of the Day Chocolate Company, which makes fair trade Divine and Dubble chocolate bars. Compared to Nestle’s global sales, 4.5% or so of tiny Day is a drop in an ocean. As for its fair trade coffee, once again, and predictably, it’s a token amount of the coffee it produces – just enough to get bragging rights, without any effort to make a real difference. [quote]despite Nestlé’s adoption of Fair Trade - which will be backed by a £1m advertising campaign - the company will still buy almost all of its coffee at the prevailing, low world price.[/quote] source
I think Nestle’s move is a grudging, belated and mostly cosmetic move, a cynical ploy by a company with a long history of choosing profits over ethics. For instance, according to this source,
Five years later, we can see how little has changed.
As for Cadbury, while it’s not yet fair to call the company FT as a whole, the picture is more promising. In only two countries (and soon a couple more), the Dairy Milk solid chocolate (but not other products) is FT, and Cadbury’s does own Green & Black’s, which makes fair trade chocolate. Cadbury was the first of the two to switch to fair trade (last year) for its UK and Ireland Dairy Milk solid chocolate bars, and plans to make the same switch this spring for Australia, New Zealand and Japan, and in Canada this summer. It has also stated that it intends to move toward more fair trade chocolate in the future.(source)
Personally, I’m only now becoming aware of how bad the situation is with child slavery and child abuse on the plantations, which is why I’ve been reading up on this, and why I am looking to try more kinds of fair trade chocolate.
As for the chocolate I mentioned earlier, I’ve found the remainder of the bar we got at Earthtree. It’s “Equal Exchange” brand,
Organic & fairly traded
extra dark chocolate
Panama
80%
It’s a nice dark bar with a heavenly, classic chocolate aroma, a dark, peaty flavor and lingering peaty finish, without much complexity. It’s quite good, but some people who aren’t used to 80% may have a bit of trouble on that finish. It’s not your typical sugary sweet bar with a clean or fruity finish, for sure.
Ah, so it’s just for Brit consumers, then. 
Dunno, you can get anything, here, at least in Manchester or London. I only eat raw cocoa. Chocolate’s gross.
Are British consumers more likely to prefer or even demand fair-trade products? Or is this just a coincidence?
I’ll just be my usual contrary self and be devils advocate here. Fair trade is fine for rich people but has no meaning in developing countries. Why? Because if it is too expensive people won’t buy it , leading to NO trade and no income for supplier. Now if the developing countries market didn’t exist, all the suppliers would jump into the expensive but smaller fair trade market, thereby naturally depressing the price. Conclusion…both fair trade and regular trade are important together.
It’s not for the rich people, it’s for the benefit of the exploited poor, and to help stamp out slavery.
There’s no income for the child slaves now. Just captivity and beatings.
And imagine that, no trade of cocoa produced on slave-run plantations, no income for slave owners, and no incentive to import further child slaves from neighboring countries.
No, whether or not suppliers jump into fair trade depends only on whether they care, which will only happen when enough of us care. I don’t see how the presence or absence of developing countries’ markets is relevant.
Finally, you’re assuming fair trade is necessarily more expensive. While sometimes true, remember that the organizers of fair trade and the downstream retailers are usually engaging in it at least partly for ethical rather than purely profit-driven reasons, and as such, through willingness to take a smaller profit margin themselves, they may be able to keep the final retail price near or even the same as non-FT equivalents. For instance, Cadbury absorbed the higher ingredient cost and did not raise the price of its Dairy Milk bars in the UK. My wife does the same thing on her fair-trade items.
Also, fair trade organizers are typically going directly to the farmers or other originators and cutting out the exploitative next tier up, as well as other middlemen. It is precisely by paying the originators directly that you ensure they’re getting the fair price, and a byproduct is that in so doing, you can pass the profit of at least one tier of middlemen to the farmer, while still making a normal distributor’s profit. The retailer can then get the item at a reasonable price, and can pass that on.
We can all imagine and wish for the world to be a better place, but it’s usually a lot more complicated than ‘fair trade’ is the answer. Cost is the major consideration for consumers in developing countries, if you took away that market by making the product too expensive most suppliers would be wiped out and people would starve. I’m not saying that the current situation can’t be improved of course. A combination of different markets is the key. And yes, the only people who currently can afford to buy fair trade products are indeed rich people i.e. westerners and rich people in other countries. Fair trade will always be limited to minor share as cofee/chocolate are seen as non-neccessary items…therefore most people just won’t buy it if it goes over a certain price point. It can access 10-20% of the market but unlikely to go much higher unless costs came down somehow or a true multinational fair trade company can emerge.
[quote]It’s not for the rich people, it’s for the benefit of the exploited poor, and to help stamp out slavery.
[/quote]
Nah. It’s for the rich people. It feels better to munch on chocolate with a ‘fair trade’ stamp. The exploited poor, can’t afford what they grow, no matter how fair it is.
[quote]And imagine that, no trade of cocoa produced on slave-run plantations, no income for slave owners, and no incentive to import further child slaves from neighboring countries.
[/quote]
Another cash crop, another trade.
Only so that their profits stay up. Farmers are not richer for that practice. You are assuming that the ‘next tier’ is exploitative and not the fair trade organizer itself. The whole idea is stupid. The Leather Satchel in India retailing for 1880NTD only cost 80NTD to make in India, and if it is Fair trade the maker may have gotten 100NTD for 10 bags. If it’s unfair trade, he gets 95 NTD for 2000 bags. You do the Math.
The reason why that bag retails for 1880 atthe earth tree shop is because, it was imported, not in bulk, it has the ‘fair trade’ stamp on it and it is probably sold in ‘boutique’ one of a kind setting!
[quote]I don’t see how the presence or absence of developing countries’ markets is relevant.
[/quote]
This is where the companies make money. It is the developing market where most dairy milk’s are sold. The Developed have already moved on to ‘fair trade and low fat/organic’ blah blah blah.
There is no fair trade. Expensive boutiques and weird products like candles don’t support economies, or villages. They are all marketing gimmicks. Exclusivity and all of that. Do you know the cardamoms you bought weren’t picked by pregnant women who get a cup of tea as their daily wage? Or the safron from Xinjiang wasn’t smuggled? Or the fair trade Cocoa plantation which was the source of Cadbury’s cacao was not a smuggler’s side gig.
Fair trade, comes from education and literacy. From Govts. that regulate trade and respect their farmers, producers, workers.
I would rathere buy a T-shirt for 300 NtD from a giordano/carrefour type chain, coz i know a LOT of people are getting paid, rather than a silly fair trade orgnization that charges me 4 times the price to give one farmer an extra dollar.
Trade and retail is about profit and advertising. As long as you make a profit and discreetly advertise what you sell, you will stay in the business.