The fine print of ethical shopping
Ethical shopping, it seems, comes with fine print. And it's in that fine print, Fridell says, that shoppers can see the limits of trying to make the world a better place through consumption.
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Want to be sure you're drinking socially responsible coffee? Here's all you have to do:
Open starbucks.com. Click on "about us," then "Our Corporate Social Responsibility Department," then (on the left-hand side) "sustaining coffee communities," then "Starbucks Coffee and Farmer Equity Practices."
You arrive at starbucks.com/about us/sourcingcoffee.asp. Click on "scientific certification systems," then "documents/downloads (English)," then "documents for participants (suppliers, processors, farmers)," then "CAFE Practices Evaluation Guidelines 010307."
Read the 19-page PDF document, including four pages of glossary.
That, and $1.75, will get you a cup of coffee. One with about a 10 per cent chance of being socially responsible, says Gavin Fridell, an assistant professor at Trent University who specializes in fair trade products.
"It's all very complicated," Fridell says as he dives into a pile of printouts from the Starbucks website.
Ethical shopping, it seems, comes with fine print. And it's in that fine print, Fridell says, that shoppers can see the limits of trying to make the world a better place through consumption. The trick, he says, is to sort the hype from the reality.
For Starbucks, the reality is that the company needs high-quality coffee – and lots of it.
Categories such as organic or fair trade and even shade-grown coffee are recognized by most customers as living up to tough environmental and social standards, but simply don't produce enough coffee for a company the size of Starbucks, says Dennis Macray, director of business practices.
"They have limitations in scale and scope, so we were going to need to go beyond that," he says in a telephone interview from the company's headquarters in Seattle.
Fair trade, for instance, requires that coffee be grown on small farms or co-operatives. Plantations and large farms with hired labour, which make up a much of the Starbucks supply chain, are not allowed, Macray says, so the company had to set up its own sustainability system.
"We had the real potential to do something different that hadn't been done in the industry before – which is to really link performance to purchasing around sustainability," he says.
"That doesn't mean we're not buying those other coffees."
About 6 per cent of Starbucks' coffee last year was certified as fair trade. The company buys almost 300 million pounds of coffee a year.
Marketing expert Susan Sommers says it's no surprise that companies want to be seen as being socially responsible in any way they can – customers are demanding it.
"Social responsibility and green marketing are huge right now," says Sommers, a marketing consultant who also lectures at the University of Toronto.
Brenda Plant, co-director of the Montreal-based Responsible Consumer Network, says studies in the U.S. have found that the market tops $227 billion (U.S.) a year and that 30 per cent of customers said they would favour socially responsible products.
The problem, she says, is that people can often have a tough time figuring out who is living up to the hype and who is not. Most people have felt let down by other past advertising promises, so often approach ethical shopping with some skepticism.
"That kind of lack of trust can lead to inaction," says Plant, whose agency runs ethiquette.ca to advise shoppers on companies that live up to their socially responsible promises.
"It can be very difficult to discern what is responsible and what is not."
Fridell, author of Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice, has been trying for the last few weeks to parse what socially responsible coffee means at Starbucks, the world's largest coffee chain. He's got a folder full of computer printouts for his troubles and is now sifting through the pages of reports, footnotes and side reports generated by his effort.
To sort it all out, he's written a two-page "cheat sheet" summarizing the main points.
"I get paid to do this sort of thing," says Fridell, leafing through the pile. "No ordinary customer is going to go through all this."
Macray, however, says the majority of Starbucks customers care more about the quality of the coffee than where it comes from.
"It's not a top priority," he says. "Our business model is built around a great experience for our customers."
Fridell says companies jumping on the social responsibility bandwagon are making genuine efforts to be better corporate citizens. But their efforts, while certainly better than doing nothing, tend to be limited and structured to meet the corporation's needs at least as much as the social justice goals, he says.
"Starbucks is the leader of this sort of thing," he says.
Seattle-based Starbucks set up a program called CAFE, or Coffee and Farmer Equity, to encourage suppliers by giving them a price premium if they adhere to environmental and social responsibility standards. The company boasts that 53 per cent of its beans, or 155 million pounds, are now certified under the program.
But with a little digging, Fridell found there are three tiers to the CAFE program. The first includes suppliers who met at least 80 per cent of the CAFE criteria. About 19 per cent of the 53 per cent fell into that category, or 10.7 per cent of the company's total bean purchases.
Twelve per cent fell into the second category, achieving between 60 and 80 per cent of the targets. More than two-thirds, or 69 per cent, of the beans certified under Starbucks' ethical shopping program met less that 60 per cent of the targets set.
"By most measures, that's a failing mark," says Fridell.
While more than half of Starbucks' beans are certified under its ethical guidelines, Fridell says he was amazed to realize that the majority were, in fact, certified as not living up to the stated goals.
"It's Orwellian," he says.
Macray bristles at such criticism, saying farmers in the third category have made a commitment to the program's highest standards and are working with the company to achieve them. They deserve recognition for the work required just to get into CAFE and will get increasingly better prices as they move up.
"Just getting verified is no small feat," he says. "It sets them up to improve."
Starbucks has set a goal for 2007 of buying 225 million pounds of coffee under the CAFE program, a jump of more than 30 per cent, Macray says.
It's tough to gauge, he says, just how much information to provide to customers on such programs.
"We've erred on the side of never providing enough information, because the depth and the context can be overwhelming," he says. "Perhaps we've been too humble."
Plant has sifted through the fine print of many companies billing themselves as ecologically and socially responsible. She remembers a shoe company trying to get listed on ethiquette.ca as a supplier of eco-footwear. She was keen to include them, since many people had asked her for socially responsible shoes.
She confirmed that the rubber was from an ecologically friendly source. The cotton for the uppers was organic. Good. But then came questions about the manufacturing. It was done in China and the company was vague about the factory conditions.
"We would not include them (on the website)," Plant says.
The site lists dozens of companies selling everything from coffee (Starbucks is not listed) to clothing to cosmetics to toys. For Montreal-area shoppers, it also lists specific stores to find the products. The fine print has been checked for all the listings, Plant says, saving shoppers that hassle.
Plant and Sommers warn it can be disastrous for a company to make ecological or social responsibility claims and then fail to live up to them or to include so much fine print that it feeds consumer cynicism.
"People expect companies to stand behind their claims," says Sommers.
But too much fine print, Plant warns, can make matters worse by feeding consumer skepticism and driving shoppers away. It can even be worse than doing nothing at all.
"If people feel deceived, that trust is lost, and it's very, very, very, very hard to get back."
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