Cafédirect:
fairtrade pioneer
In 2003, Cafédirect became the only major brand to guarantee tea grower organisations a minimum price for their tea.
During 2007, Cafédirect worked directly with tea growers to introduce an improved pricing structure to provide additional support when market prices drop. As a result, the company increased its minimum price by 8%, and, including the Fairtrade premium, paid on average 47% over and above market prices.
Our policy reflects increases in growers' production costs, rewards them for quality and allows investment into their businesses.
This ensures the highest quality tea for Teadirect so it tastes as great as ever; our tea partners can plan for the future, provide for their families, and strengthen their businesses.
tea pricing
policy
"Our new pricing policy is the result of working closely with our grower partners. As with our coffee and cocoa growers, we wanted to create a system for our tea growers that rewards quality and also shields them from the damaging impact of low market prices.”
Sylvie Barr, Head of Marketing, Cafédirect
Julius
Ethang’atha,
... Tea Grower
"Cafédirect was one of the very first, if not the first tea buying company to boldly give a floor price to its suppliers. This showed genuineness in approach to 'Fairness'. The bold step has gone a long way to strengthen the bond of true 'partnership' between producer and buyer.
pricing
At Cafédirect, 100% of our range of coffees, teas and hot chocolates is Fairtrade.
This means that they are all certified by the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO) and that we meet their criteria for paying a fair price to growers. In fact, at Cafédirect we go beyond the Fairtrade criteria and have a unique pricing structure.
What’s more, our Gold Standard policy also ensures that a significant amount of our profits is reinvested into our Producer Partnership Programmes. (From 2003 to 2006 we reinvested on average 60% of our profits).

