The gloves are off!

Every May, Fairtrade companies across Canada are pitted head-to-head in a (fair, respectful, and polite) competition to be named Canada’s Favourite Fairtrade Product. We’re all over it!

Here’s how you can help!

1. Cast your vote for Ethical Bean Coffee HERE!

2. Help us spread the word by sharing our voting link with your friends.

3. Take a minute to see all the ways to spread good and do good with Fairtrade Canada’s Karma campaign.

Votes are limited to one per person.

Thanks for your support!

We take Fairtrade Karma seriously. Your purchase of Fairtrade coffee makes a difference in the lives of farmers and their communities in coffee growing countries, and we want those positive ripples to continue right back to you.

That’s why we’ve create a Karma 5 Pack available on our Canadian and US online stores. The Karma 5 Pack will be available online until May 15th, so get yours soon!

When you buy the Karma 5 Pack of Ethical Bean coffee, we’ll send you an extra bag of coffee to give to a friend, relative, or stranger so you can spread the word about fairtrade and get yourself some Fairtrade Karma!

Cash in on your karmic goodness by letting us know on our facebook page who you gave your extra bag of coffee to and we’ll send you a coupon code for a 10% discount on your next online purchase.

How’s that for good karma?

facebook.com/ethicalbean

Target Canada just opened its first 9 stores in BC and we’re proud to be part of it. Among all the other great products that will be in Target, you’ll find Ethical Bean Coffee on the shelves of their grocery isle.

You’ll find Target stores in Vancouver, Victoria, Kamloops and Nanaimo to name a few. Here’s a full list of stores. 124 locations in total will be open across Canada by the end of the year.

Let us know if you’ve visited to one of the new locations and say hi to us in the coffee isle!

Fairtrade Fortnight is a two-week celebration of all things Fair Trade. This year, Fair Trade Canada and participating businesses are using the Fortnight to spread good vibes around the world through the incredible Karma Campaign!

It’s simple. You do something nice for the world – like volunteer, buy a Fair Trade product, or hold the elevator – and the world will do something nice for you in return.

This Tuesday, come out and receive a FREE cup of Ethical Bean coffee outside of Triple O’s on the UBC campus from 11am – 1pm. There will be stickers and materials to share and learn more about Fair Trade, in addition to some spectacular coffee (hot and iced varieties) to keep you moving.

Now that’s good karma!

Sometimes the stars align perfectly and good things can happen. As Fairtrade Canada’s Karma Campaign rolls out, we discovered an exciting new kickstarter project, Connected By Coffee, that needs crowd-sourced micro-funding from coffee lovers like you.

Connected By Coffee, created by husband-and-wife team Aaron and Chelsea Dennis, will be a full-length feature documentary around the coffee industry, exploring the lives of coffee farmers and the progress and challenges of Fair Trade coffee at every step along its path to your cup.

Coffee is a multi-million dollar industry, with approx. 1.4 billion cups of coffee consumed per day. Every bean has to be hand-picked and meticulously processed in order to fill that need, yet the vast majority of farmers continue to struggle to make ends meet and get ahead. How can Fair Trade do a better job to improve lives? Can a label on a product ensure justice? What is the future of Fairtrade? Connected By Coffee explores all these questions.

As a 100% Fairtrade organization, we are constantly looking at Fairtrade and its impact on farmers’ lives and understanding amongst customers. It has come a long way in 20 years, with more producers, cooperatives, and buyers involved in the system than ever before. In many cases, Fairtrade coffee sales have contributed to the fight for social justice and decent working conditions. Despite its many successes, there is still a lot of room for improvement in fair trade. Projects like Connected By Coffee can offer unique insights into some of the toughest challenges in Fairtrade, and we would love your help to spread the word to help move the project closer towards production!

With nine days left to contribute to the project, we urge you to take a look and help fund it – even $5 can help make this project happen. Coincidently, their final days on Kickstarter coincide with the first half of the Fairtrade Fortnight, a two-week celebration of all things Fair Trade celebrated all over the world. Look for more about Fairtrade in the coming weeks!

Share on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, and spread some good Karma about Fairtrade and all those working to create a world where all trade truly is fair.

April has been designated Earth Month, and the official Earth Day is coming up on the 22nd. It’s a perfect time to think about what we can do to be kinder to the earth and our environment.

From the very start, Ethical Bean Coffee has strived to be as green as possible in everything we do. At the top of our list is buying only fairtrade certified, organic coffee beans. This assures that farmers are paid a fair wage and their working conditions are safe from harmful chemicals and farming practices. Did you know all Fairtrade Certified Organic Certified coffee is also Shade Grown? This maintains older forest growth and the tree canopy houses birds and other animals that in turn pollinate and help fertilize the soil. Back at home, our building is built to LEED Gold Standard, our roastery & offices are carbon-neutral and run on green energy via Bullfrog Power. We do our best to always use ethically sourced products and materials.

In our café, all of the cutlery, cups and food wrappers are biodegradeable, and we encourage people to dine in so no extra packaging is used for their food or drink.

Below are 6 tips you can easily integrate into your life that can make a huge positive impact on our environment. See if you can get your friends to try them too!

1. Unplug appliances when they’re not in use.
If you plug items into a power bar it’s easier to switch them off all at once. You’ll save a ton on your power bill too!

“It is estimated that the savings in reducing products that use standby power nationwide to one watt would equal the amount of electricity needed to power 400,000 homes. Emissions reductions would be equivalent to taking a large coal-fired power generating unit offline.”

Find more easy-to-do energy saving tips on the BC Hydro website.

2. Use a travel mug.
Yes, we know, sometimes it’s hard to remember to bring your travel mug with you, but when you get into the habit, you’ll feel oh-so-good about yourself! It’s estimated that the average coffee drinker throws away 250 cups per year – that adds up to 58 billion cups per year – almost all of these are not recyclable.

There’s an added bonus to bringing your own coffee cup too – most cafés and coffee shops will give you a discount on the price of a cup of coffee if you bring in your own mug. At our Kootenay St. Café we’ll discount your coffee by 25¢.

3. Carry a reusable water bottle with you.
Toss one in the back of the car or in your gym bag so you can use tapwater instead of buying bottled water.

4. Recycle your old laptops, computers, small appliances, cellphones, batteries and packaging/styrofoam properly at London Drugs.
The have a great recycling program to help you with those difficult to recycle things!
Here’s a list of items they take.

5. Reduce your water use.
There are some small things with big results that can significantly reduce your water usage.

• Turn the tap off when you’re brushing your teeth.
• Keep a jug of water on standby in the fridge instead of running the tap until the water is cold enough for you to fill your glass.
• Try to reduce the number of times you flush the toilet. Yes, we know its icky but “If it’s yellow, let it mellow…”. You can also add a brick or a plastic litre bottle of water to your toilet tank to reduce the volume of water used in each flush.

6. Walk.
Seriously. If you can do without using your car, then it’s good for your health and for the environment. Take a shopping trolly with you when you buy your groceries and buy in smaller quantities more often. Use neighbourhood retailers and restaurants so you don’t have a massive trek. You can even car share with friends or neighbours when you go to big box stores. (Everybody needs to go to Ikea, right?)

Do you have any easy-to-do-at-home ideas to lessen our impact on the environment? Let us know in the comments below!

The move coincides with Ethical Bean Coffee’s decision to move away from franchising and focus on what it does best – roasting great tasting, high quality coffee – to supply its expanding grocery market.

A big thanks goes out to all the customers of Ethical Bean Xpress for your support over the years.

Our in-house Roastery Cafe, located at 1315 Kootenay Street, is open for business as usual and you can continue to find Ethical Bean Coffee widely available at a retailer near you.

We all know about fair trade coffee, tea and chocolate, but did you know there is a wealth of other fair trade organic food products out there for you?

We posted a few delicious fair trade organic recipes last month and it occurred to us that some of the lesser known FTO ingredients aren’t always easy to find. Sugar, vanilla, molasses, quinoa, bananas, rice, peppercorns, coconut milk and a myriad spices are all available in fair trade options.

We’ve put together a small list of places to buy them, some ideas on how to find them in your neighbourhood, and things to do to encourage your local retailers to carry more fair trade products.

Fairtrade Vancouver has a handy FTO products chart you can download to keep track of where to buy in Vancouver. If you’re not in Vancouver, you can always shop online with the following companies.

Spud.ca or Spud.com for the US – spud carries fresh fair trade Ginger amongst its many other FTO products. The second best thing? They deliver right to your door!

Arayuma – they carry FTO coconut milk, and various spices. They have a store locator on their site so you can find a retailer close to you.

Fair Seas Spices – they carry just about every spice you’ll ever need and they’re easy to purchase online if you can’t find them in your local grocers. They also have some great fair trade recipes on their site too!

Frontier – they have a great variety of fair trade products and they carry a number of fair trade ingredients cake mixes in case you don’t want to do it all from scratch.

While it’s great to find your fair trade ingredients online, it’s a whole lot easier to just pick them up from your local grocery store. Become a voice for fair trade and seek out your local grocery store manager – ask them about the fair trade products they have in stock and put in a special request that they carry a specific item. The more our retailers are asked about fair trade, the more we’ll see on our shelves.

The Musqueam Community Center in Vancouver will be the site of the Native Education College’s Musqueam and NEC All Nations Basketball Tournament. Starting Friday, March 15, through Sunday, March 17, check out some of the 18 basketball teams from across BC and enjoy a cup of Ethical Bean Coffee.

You can also enjoy a cup of EB at the 3rd Annual Acumen Fund Case Competition. This is a social business case competition designed to push students to apply their business knowledge in solving social venture issues. Student teams at the Undergraduate and MBA level from UBC, SFU and Langara will be competing and will be presenting a case centered on social entrepreneurship. Check out the presentations on Saturday, March 16, from 12:00 – 4:30pm, at the Neville Scarf building at UBC.

This week’s Share the Love recipe is a delicious super spicy ginger cake. If you’ve got a recipe to share that contains coffee as an ingredient, or goes great with a cup of coffee, we’d love to hear from you. Leave your recipe in the comment section below!


 
 
Spicy Gingerbread Cake

This cake is a big hit with everyone who’s tried it. It’s moist, delicious and extra gingery spicy. Dust with icing sugar and you’ve got yourself one spectacular cake!
 
 
 

Cake Ingredients
½ cup of packed fairtrade brown sugar
¼ cup of margarine
2 large free range eggs
1 cup of organic applesauce
½ cup of fancy molasses
½ cup of fresh, grated fairtrade organic ginger
1½ cups of organic pastry flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp allspice

Directions
Preheat oven to 350°F.
Beat brown sugar and margarine until smooth with an electric mixer.
Beat in eggs,beating well after each addition.
Mix in apple sauce, molasses and ginger until smooth.
Combine flour, soda, powder, salt and allspice. Gradually add into sugar mixture, beating 2 to 3 minutes.
Transfer to greased bundt pan and bake at 350° for 40 minutes or until cake pulls away from the side of the cake pan. Place wet, hot tea towel over cake while in bundt pan and let steam for 10 minutes to help with cake removal.
Dust with icing sugar. Serve warm or cold.