Saturday Soapbox: Fair Trade wine?
January 24, 2009 by Katherine Liew
Filed under Marketing
Image: Katherine Liew
The Fair Trade logo has been used on products like coffee and chocolate to indicate that the farmers involved have been paid a fair price for their goods.
Certification is required to display the logo that you see on the South African wine above, which you can see enlarged below:
Source: Fairtrade Foundation
My questions to you are:
Would a Fair Trade logo influence your choice of wine?
Would you pay more for Fair Trade wine?
I wasn’t aware of this but it’s nice to know. I think we need to support our local businesses – and that includes farmers.
Price and quality being equal, I usually go for free trade products. I pay more if there is a really good story behind the fair trade product. I don’t think a logo does that – there needs to be an emotional appeal or a sense of real people being helped to get me to spend more. Imagine if instead of a logo, fair trade products had photos of the people behind the product. It would be far more powerful.
Well I’m not sure about the story behind it – have you heard about many grape growers being exploited?