Cafédirect

Cafédirect PLC

The Cafédirect logo, adopted in 2012
Type	Public
Industry	Fairtrade beverages
Founded	1991
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom
Key people	John Steel (CEO), Jeff Halliwell (Chairman)
Products	Coffee, Tea, Cocoa
Website	www.cafedirect.co.uk

Cafédirect is a UK-based alternative trading organization. Cafédirect was founded in 1991 by Oxfam, Traidcraft, Equal Exchange Trading and Twin Trading as a response to the 1989 global collapse in coffee prices. It's slogan is "champion the work & passion of smallholder growers, delivering great tasting hot drinks to improve livelihoods, whilst pioneering new better ways of doing business." The company's vision is "A rebalanced world which celebrates business as a force for good and measures success in the shared wellbeing of the communities it touches."

In 2007, the company's market share for hot drinks equated to 34%, 32%, and 14% respectively of the UK's Fairtrade coffee, tea, and drinking chocolate markets. In the overall market, Cafedirect is the 5th largest coffee brand and 7th largest tea brand in the UK.

Cafédirect has established the Gold Standard, a guarantee to pay above the world market price for coffee, and to support the development of producers. Between 2004 and 2009, Cafédirect paid more than £7.5 million above the market price to growers (including Fairtrade premiums), invested over £3 million in tailor-made programmes to strengthen growers’ businesses, which represents more than 50% of the company's profits and in total, paid more than £10.5 million towards the businesses and communities of their grower partners.

In addition to paying a fair price to growers in developing countries, the company donates a percentage of its profits to producers for activities such as market information and management training. In 2007, the company invested a £600,000 in its Producer Partnership Programmes (PPP) and these investments attracted, without additional cost to the company, matched funds of £700,000, meaning growers benefited from a total investment of £1.3 million.

In 2007, the organization launched amongst other things:

Since then it has pioneered projects, such as the 'Reforestation Sierra Piura' project, which enabled coffee growers to join forces with subsistence communities nearby to overcome issues faced by climate change and provided a sustainable existence via carbon credit schemes. This was the first such project where carbon credits were wholly owned by the communities at origin.