Carol Medeiros joined Whole Foods Market in 2001 at our Cherry Creek store in Denver and has been working on our produce and floral team ever since.
You may remember Karen’s Whole Trade roses post from last summer, sharing the story of the Ecuadorian Fair Trade certified flower farms that supply our Whole Trade Guarantee roses. Well, with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, what better time to share an update on Whole Trade flowers with you?
I was one of the Team Members to visit the Ecuadorian farms. I look back on these trips & consider myself lucky to have been a part of them – such a beautiful country, incredible product, wonderful people and inspiring stories. Read the rest of this entry »
Community Relations Team Leader Shonelle Bellon from our Santa Cruz store shares her thoughts on Whole Trade Guarantee™ Month.
February is Whole Trade Guarantee Month! (Enter to win Whole Trade flowers for a year!) During the season of romance, we are also celebrating fair wages, environmental sustainability and philanthropy throughout the world. When you’re shopping for Valentine’s Day gifts, I recommend browsing our Whole Trade Guarantee™ beautiful roses and decadent chocolates (Divine Chocolate, Equal Exchange and Theo Chocolate, just to name a few brands).
Beyond romantic treats, I shop for Whole Trade teas, coffees, body care and grocery products throughout the store. Here are a few of my very favorite items: Read the rest of this entry »
Thanks to our Whole Trade Guarantee program, I get to work with a ton of great vendors who are using their businesses in order to change people’s lives. Every day I hear stories that are truly inspiring, and this blog is a place where I get to share it all with you.
As you may remember, The Whole Trade Guarantee is a buying program that brings together a strict set of criteria for products from developing countries. This program guarantees exceptional product quality, more money for producers, better wages and working conditions for workers, sound environmental production practices and the support of poverty eradication through a donation of one percent of product sales to our Whole Planet Foundation.
Continuing our cold weather = tea weather theme, I wanted to spotlight the Choice Organic Teas. Recently Whole Foods Market launched four new tea items from Choice, a new line of full leaf teas, which, if you recall my last post, is one of the hottest trends in the tea category. The tea experts at Choice use hand-picked whole leaf teas, flavorful herbs, and delicate flowers in a biodegradable tea pyramid pouch. The pouch and the pungent tea leaves are the precise combination to create the prefect brew. The new products are a mix of traditional methods and flavors combined with high quality tea.
Dr. Bronner’s Magical Soap was one of the first Whole Body products offered at our original Whole Foods Market store in Austin, Texas in 1980. Over the years Dr. Bronner’s and Whole Foods Market have successfully grown their business in parallel, always committed to caring for the communities and environment around them. Today Dr. Bronner’s and Whole Foods Market have taken great strides towards improving the lives of producers in Third World countries with the fair trade certification of Dr. Bronner’s ingredients and the establishment of the Whole Trade Guarantee.
In shifting their supply chains to certified Fair Trade ingredients, Dr. Bronner’s makes a big difference in the lives of several thousand farmers and workers. Here are a few of their stories.
“Thank you Whole Foods. Thank you for our new class room!”
Those are the words of a song written for Whole Foods Market by students in Ghana Africa. The school was built because Whole Foods Market customers bought Blessing Baskets. Thank you for helping us weave hope into the world one basket at a time!
To see the global chain reaction you helped start, click here.
Note: These great baskets aren’t available in all of our stores. Sorry! Look for them in the Midwest, North Atlantic, Northeast, Rocky Mountain and Florida.
Learn more about The Blessing Basket Project and their mission to pay weavers multiple times more than Fair Trade wages for their baskets — calling it “prosperity wages.” Every basket they sell helps create sustainable jobs and helps reduce poverty in the villages they serve.
The Alaffia holiday baskets were uniquely designed and created for the 2008 holiday season. These are Alaffia basket weavers in Blitta, Togo. Gift baskets include the basket, three body care products and a handcrafted ornament and retail for $34.99.
Six months ago, while on the road I received a suggestion from Justin Miloro (Global Associate Whole Body Coordinator) for Alaffia to propose an exclusive Fair Trade gift basket to Whole Foods for the holidays. I remember feeling a little fever at this moment, as my mind went immediately to the Alaffia Basket Cooperative in Togo. I went directly to contact Togo, and a week later we had a prototype basket to present to Justin. Upon his approval, we immediately began weaving the baskets in Togo. We invited 16 women from the Bolga region of Ghana to join the 100 Alaffia basket weavers. After two weeks of production, we realized that even with 116 women, we would not be able to make enough baskets on time since each basket takes an average of three days to complete. Our cooperative director, Limata Gbadamassi made a trip to the northern Ghana Bolga region to meet with more basket coops. For the next three months, more than 350 women worked to complete the gift basket order.
As the first and only organic and Fair Trade chocolate factory in the U.S., bringing Theo Chocolate to our stores as part of our Whole Trade Guarantee makes perfect sense. They have a bar for everyone, but I’m partial to their Ivory Coast Dark Chocolate Bar with 75% Cacao and the Venezuelan 91% Chocolate Bar. And you have to check out their Jane Goodall “good for all” bars, which are now exclusively available at Whole Foods Market stores. Learn more about their high standards for social and environmental responsibility. Their excellent outreach work is exemplified by Juanita Vilchez’s story below.
Imagine a world where honey bees are your family’s livelihood. The hives are tucked deep in the jungles of Chiapas and Quintana Roo, and have been tended by Mayan communities for generations. Although there is a centuries-old beekeeping tradition there, honey production has only recently been recognized as a viable and stable income opportunity in the global market.
In years past, middlemen, or “coyotes,” took a majority of the beekeepers’ income. With assistance from TransFair USA, Wholesome Sweeteners is able to pay a fair price directly to the beekeepers, who have formed vibrant worker-owned cooperatives that create meaningful employment, improve product quality, and send their children to school – until now, an unaffordable luxury in these economically-depressed regions. Additionally, by protecting the hives and native plant forage areas, Fair Trade encourages biodiversity and helps the forests thrive.
If you aren’t on a vegan diet, chances are you didn’t know that all sugar isn’t considered vegan. It doesn’t come from an animal so what’s the issue? Bone char. Bet you didn’t know that many sugars are processed with bone char either. Bone char, usually made from the bones of cows, is used in the decolorization process for sugar – meaning it whitens the sugar through a filtration process. Standard sugar packages won’t explain all of this, but the process is unacceptable to many vegans and they avoid sugar as a result.
But that may be about to change when all the vegans out there find out about our 365 Everyday Value™ Vegan Cane Sugar (which retails for about $4 for a 4-pound bag). Our vegan sugar goes through a 100% animal-free carbon deactivation process to decolorize. This carbon is a mineral and therefore, a non-animal source. Great news, right?
Welcome to Whole Story, the official blog of Whole Foods Market.
Don’t know us? In a nutshell, we are the world's leading natural and organic grocer and we’re passionate about healthy food and a healthy planet. Learn more about us.
We’re lucky to have a whole bunch of smart, passionate people doing incredible things in areas like organics, supporting local growers, green practices, fair trade, micro-lending and all kinds of food related stuff. We’ll use this blog to share some of the cool things going on around here.
Of course, what makes this blog really exciting is YOU — so join the conversation!
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You may remember Karen’s Whole Trade roses post from last summer, sharing the story of the Ecuadorian Fair Trade certified flower farms that supply our Whole Trade Guarantee roses. Well, with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, what better time to share an update on Whole Trade flowers with you?
Imagine a world where honey bees are your family’s livelihood. The hives are tucked deep in the jungles of Chiapas and Quintana Roo, and have been tended by Mayan communities for generations. Although there is a centuries-old beekeeping tradition there, honey production has only recently been recognized as a viable and stable income opportunity in the global market.
