Last week Cadbury announced that it will source fair-trade ingredients for all its dairy milk chocolate. Great news for cocoa farmers in Ghana.
This is also a great example of how private sector firms can support the mainstreaming of social enterprise - fair trade being one of the many different faces of the social enterprise movement.
I like this deal because at is heart is a win-win for both sides. This is not actually about corporate social responsibility (even if this was developed out of Cadbury’s CSR team). This is a business deal and a way for Cadburys to retain and build market share through ethical branding.
Some of the comments this week have questioned whether there will be negative effects on pure fair trade producers such as Divine. Apparently, Café Direct’s sales dropped 5% as supermarkets started retailing their own fair trade brands.
However, this misses the point. We need the large retailers to adopt fair trade sourcing to enable the positive benefits of fair trade to be spread most widely.
Divine still has a part to play. I suggest it’s not because they are a ‘true’ social enterprise and reinvest profits, as a Divine spokesperson commented this week. Divine can be proud of the work that it has done for 10 years now and recognise the competitive advantage that this head-start gives them. I would encourage Divine to talk - and keep talking - about the quality of its chocolate products. This is one of the key ways for Divine to be successful in increasingly competitive fair trade marketplace and to continue to create social impact in the long-term.
Other comments on this at:
http://www.divinechocolate.com/news/04032009073247.aspx
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/mar/04/fair-trade-cocoa-cadbury?commentpage=1&commentposted=1
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/cadbury-adopts-fairtrade-source-1636575.html http://www.cadburydairymilk.typepad.com/?campaign_id=ukhcm
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1 comments:
It's a cliche, but still true - the innovator - Divine in this case - needs to continue to innovate. I'm pretty sure this will hurt Divine's sales - Cadbury's have already said that the price of Dairy Milk won't go up - and in that particular part of the chocolate market price is very important.
But I'm sure Divine are smart enough to keep competing. And as you say, what producers want more than anything is more sales - so Cadbury's move is without doubt a positive one.
I've commented more on this here - there's also comment from Divine and Cadbury's there too:
http://tinyurl.com/cl8mf4
Thanks
Rob
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