Fast-food chain offers diners taste of fair-trade fruit tea
Café de Coral is first to partner foundation in support of poor Sri Lankan farmers
Diners at a fast-food chain can now get a taste of a fair-trade fruit tea from Sri Lanka without having to pay extra.
And this will go towards helping 6,000 underprivileged farmers in the South Asian country to improve their lives, the Fair Trade Hong Kong Foundation says.
Ten Café de Coral branches in Admiralty, Causeway Bay and other areas started offering the Sri Lankan fair-trade fruit tea last week. Diners can choose to have the tea with their meals for the price of normal tea at HK$5 a cup with any purchase of food, or HK$10 a cup without a meal.
It was not always easy to persuade corporations to support the fair trade campaign, but things were improving with its first partnership with Café de Coral, said the foundation, which acts as a bridge between fair-trade organisations and commercial businesses.
"We are not undertaking charity in fair trade. It is [merely] a fair platform to discuss a price," said founder Leung Pui-fung.
And it was a misconception that fair-trade products were expensive and available only for the minority, she added.
As in the case of the Sri Lankan tea farmers, many small-scale producers are being squeezed out of the market by mass producers. They had little bargaining power when negotiating prices for their product.