We’re excited to announce the arrival of our Whole Trade™ Francique (AKA Francis) mangoes from Haiti. The first shipments of the season are working their way to our stores this week. We hope to offer them throughout May, but supply is limited so we recommend you check with your local store before you make a special trip.

These are some of the best mangoes that arrive in the U.S. each year. The Francique variety is unique to Haiti and available only during a short season each spring. These are plump, juicy mangoes with lots of fruit on them. When ripe, they are soft with an orange or gold freckled skin. They have a smooth, rich flesh and distinct tropical flavor. Personally, I taste a hint of coconut.  The New York Times recently described Haitian mangoes as velvety fleshed and honeyed with a bright flavor. Whichever words you choose, we think you’ll agree these are worth a try!

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It’s been just over a year since we launched Whole Trade Pineapple, featuring fresh fruit from just four farms in Costa Rica that meet our high quality standards and the high social and environmental standards of our Whole Trade Certifier partners at the Rainforest Alliance and Fair Trade USA.

Much of our Whole Trade Organic pineapple comes from Finca Corsicana, an organic and Fair Trade Certified farm in northeast Costa Rica. Fair Trade requires that a part of our purchase price be passed through to a fund controlled directly by the workers on the farm. The workers vote on how to invest the money to benefit their communities.

When we launched the Whole Trade pineapple program, our contributions to this fund at Corsicana began accruing. One year and a lot of pineapples later, the farm workers at Corsicana are well on their way to breaking ground on their first community projects. We are in close contact with the farm and wanted to pass along this update.

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You’ll find Whole Trade™ organic Kent mangos from Peru in our stores now.

For the past few winters, we’ve offered these sweet and juicy Kent variety mangos grown by a group of small growers in northern Peru. This year, we’ve developed a more direct supply chain and are excited to offer this fruit with our Whole Trade Guarantee™, which is our commitment to ethical trade, the environment and high quality.

The mangos are grown by members of the Small Farmers Association of Tongorrape (in Spanish, Asociación de Pequeños Productores de Tongorrape, or APPT). The group was established in 1999, and today it unites approximately 140 organic farmers in the Motupe Valley of Peru, about 500 miles north of Lima. The growers of APPT farm organic mangos, bananas, passion fruit and other crops on small parcels averaging about five acres. Most members have diversified farms with multiple rotating crops, a practice which protects the soil and reduces pest pressure.

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Our produce team has been learning a lot about pineapple lately. We had heard from various sources about environmental problems associated with pineapple production in Costa Rica and we wanted to know more. Over the past six months, we’ve toured farms, tasted lots of pineapple and met with a diverse group of knowledgeable people, including growers (large and small), farm workers, importers, certifiers, academics and others – a peace corps volunteer even took a long bus ride to tell us about her life and work in a community on the edge of a big pineapple farm.

As a result of what we’ve learned, this April (Earth Month) we’re introducing Whole Trade Pineapple. As always, the Whole Trade Guarantee™ is our commitment to ethical trade, the environment and the highest quality. In this case, the quality speaks for itself. This fruit is excellent – fresh, ripe and sweet. I’ll explain in the rest of this post why it’s also important that it meet the other requirements of the Whole Trade Guarantee.

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During Whole Trade February, we hope you’ve learned a lot about the difference that Whole Trade makes. In case you are just tuning in, The Whole Trade Guarantee is our commitment to quality, the environment and ethical trade with partners in developing countries. To wrap up the month, we wanted to revisit bananas – our first Whole Trade product and a great example of the very real, positive impact we can have on farm workers, communities and the environment while providing a quality product to our customers.

Bananas were the first product to carry the Whole Trade Guarantee. Over the past several years, we’ve built relationships with some of the world’s best and most socially and environmentally innovative banana growers. Bananas from these farms are now stickered with the Whole Trade seal and are available in our stores nationwide almost every day. Considering the social and environmental problems that have resulted from large scale banana production in many Latin American countries, we are proud to offer this excellent fruit from growers that are truly part of the solution. Read the rest of this entry »