Why 100% Fair Trade? Just Coffee is a 100% Fair Trade roaster. Why is that important? We believe that you either get it or you don’t. Some companies do 5%, 25%, or 50% of their coffee using Fair Trade criteria. While any fair trade is great, we don’t know how you can commit to doing the right thing by some growers and not others. It winds up being charity as opposed to economic justice.

Doing a small percentage of fair trade has many advantages for a less-committed coffee company. A company can use their fair trade coffee to get accounts they could not with their “conventional” coffee like universities, churches, and food co-ops. They can also offer their fair trade coffee at dirt cheap prices and subsidize the loss by offsetting it with profits made for coffee bought at “sweatshop” prices.

We see fair trade as a tool to change the global economy and to help equalize the disparity of wealth between countries in the global north and the global south. By our way of thinking, anything less than a 100% commitment to the model would be disingenuous.

Small-scale farmers everywhere deserve a living wage for their hard work. And they deserve it all of the time, not just some of the time.