2008 Woodie Awards
Coffee with a conscience
Fair trade campaign continues, signatures turned into Sodexho management
Brian Messenger
Issue date: 12/1/04 Section: News
Suffolk junior Woodrow Curley is on a mission. Fresh from an afternoon gathering signatures in the Donahue Café, he arrived for an interview with The Suffolk Journal holding a 16oz Starbucks coffee cup that read, "It's time for mistletoe kisses."
But Curley wasn't drinking Starbucks. He was merely reusing the cup a friend planned on throwing away for his organic chai tea. In fact, Curley's the man spearheading the effort to remove Starbucks coffee from university cafeterias altogether.
If successful, Curley, along with the group Suffolk Students for Peace and Justice, would help bring locally roasted and Fair Trade Certified Equal Exchange coffee to Suffolk.
"Fair trade isn't a flavor, but Starbucks seems to promote it that way," Curley explained. "Fair trade is an economic practice."
During the week of Nov. 15-19, SUSPJ collected nearly 400 signatures in the Donahue Café in support of their efforts to bring fair trade coffee to the university. After sending them to General Manager of Dining Services and Sodexho employee Tom Fuller, the group will now wait for his reply, all while continuing their efforts to gain the student body's support.
"For Suffolk consumers ... [Starbucks] only offers one blend of Fair Trade Certified coffee," Curley said. "It's a mild blend ... it won't sell."
According to Fuller, who has been working at Suffolk for five years, Sodexho ordered this blend within three days of Curley's proposition to purvey fair trade coffee. In opposition to SUSPJ's claim that just one percent of Starbuck's beans are actually Fair Trade Certified, Fuller, after speaking to a Starbucks representative, said, "Although it's not a huge number, it's actually closer to five percent."
"As a local general manager, I don't have a whole lot of say from who we buy from," Fuller said. Fuller admitted that Sodexho "negotiates deals that cover the whole United States and North America," which makes it harder to break existing contracts in order to do business with local companies.