Re-Think Business as a Force for Good

We’re an organic and fair trade pioneer. Over the years, we’ve grown into a global fresh fruit group, but our mission stayed the same. We’re here to save soils, lift up lives, and nourish the world with healthy food.

We farm, export, import — and we also train and support. We are on the ground with growers, empowering them to leave poverty behind and restore ecosystems.

This is how we re-think business, and make it
fruitful for all.

REFRESH

your stocks and yourself with fruit that's flavourful and fair

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Apple

  • Organic and Demeter
  • year-round
  • three continents
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Avocado

  • organic and Fairtrade
  • year-round
  • two continents
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Coconut

  • organic
  • year-round
  • Ivory Coast
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Banana

  • organic, Fairtrade and Demeter
  • year-round
  • three countries
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Clementine

  • organic
  • October to April
  • Europe and Peru
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Ginger

  • organic and Fairtrade
  • July to May
  • Peru
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Grape

  • organic
  • most of the year
  • Europe and Africa
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Grapefruit

  • organic
  • year-round
  • three continents
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Kiwi

  • organic
  • year-round
  • Italy and New Zealand
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Lemon

  • organic
  • year-round
  • three continents
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Lime

  • organic and Fairtrade
  • year-round
  • four countries
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Mango

  • organic, Fairtrade & Demeter
  • year-round
  • three continents
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Melon

  • organic and Demeter
  • October to January
  • Brazil
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Orange

  • organic
  • most of the year
  • two continents
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Turmeric

  • organic, Fairtrade & Demeter
  • September to May
  • two countries
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Pineapple

  • organic
  • year-round
  • Ivory Coast
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Pear

  • organic and Demeter
  • year-round
  • two continents

100% organic. Large selection of
Fairtrade and Demeter. High volume.

RE-VISIT

20 years of impact
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The first big re-think
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In 2005, our founder, Patrick Struebi, was an executive at the world's largest commodities trading firm.

On a business trip to Peru, he witnessed first-hand how this industry took a toll on the environment and on rural communities. He knew he could not dedicate his life to an unjust system that was making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It was time for him to re-think.
He quit his well-paid job in Switzerland and moved to Mexico to reconsider his life.

He arrived without a plan, but once he settled into his new community of farmers, he felt a strong desire to support them. He realized that with his knowledge of international trade, he could open up tremendous opportunities, and bring the world one step closer to an ethical system of trade.
He knew that he didn't just want to help: he wanted to empower people to help themselves. He set up an organization where locals took the lead from the start, and instead of just buying and selling, focused on giving farmers the skills and the market connections that they needed break out of poverty and thrive.

This is how Fairtrasa, short for Fairtrade South America, was born.
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The world's first fairtrade avocados
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Having been founded in Mexico at the heart of the world's avocado production, our first goal was to change that industry’s status quo.

We have seen hundreds of small-scale avocado growers selling their produce to middlemen at prices that kept them trapped in a vicious cycle of poverty.
We sought to disrupt this fate. We formed a smallholder cooperative, and helped develop fair trade standards for avocados, which were unheard of at the time.

Before the year was over, we succeeded in bringing the first certified Fairtrade, organic avocados to the international market.
By showing that business can be a force for good, we changed the expectations of consumers and farmers — and the world started to change as a result.

Today, Fairtrade avocados are common on the shelves of European and North American supermarkets, improving hundreds of thousands of lives across seven countries.
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Award-winning farmer development
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Before Fairtrasa, two types of organizations worked with smallholder growers. For-profits bought their produce, while non-profits engaged in development, when their donations enabled them to do so.

For us, acting as simple traders was out of the question — we wanted to be on the ground with growers to help them improve their farms and capabilities. But we also wanted to do this without charity.
Our goal was to create a self-sufficient, financially sustainable model for development, and we succeeded.

Our approach has caught the eye of the world’s leading organization for social entrepreneurship, Ashoka. In 2008, our founder has been selected to become an Ashoka Fellow, a network of pioneers who developed new ways to use business as a force for good.
In the years that followed, we earned fellowships and distinctions from Yale University, Endeavor, CGI, UBS, Endeavor, and others.

We have also received the “Social Entrepreneur of the Year” award four times, and were invited to become a member of the World Economic Forum to share our experience with other organizations, public and private, who sought to improve their impact.
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The first vertically integrated business for farmer impact
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From day one, our goal was to scale and replicate our business-and-development model, and lift up farmers’ lives across Latin America. This is what propelled us to establish subsidiaries in several countries around the continent.

Our next challenge was to ensure that as much of the sales price flows back to the source as possible...
...not only to ensure that farmers can get fair prices, but also to finance social and environmental projects.

We realized that the best way to achieve this was to create our own import and sales offices in Europe. This is how we evolved into the first vertically integrated fresh fruit group that is set up to maximize impact.
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Re-thinking agriculture on
a global scale
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19 years have passed, and the world has become a different place. Poverty has been exacerbated by climate change, something that increasingly defines all of our daily realities.

Organic agriculture and supporting smallholder farmers remain our cornerstones of sustainability, but today we see a need to do more.
We believe that new partnerships and ongoing innovation hold the keys to continued success.

We are partnering with experts in regenerative agriculture to improve our training programs and make our growers’ more climate resilient, while turning their farms into carbon sinks.
We have also developed a new co-creator model to support socially and environmentally conscious growers around the world.

Business can only become a true force for good if we think outside the box to find solutions to the world’s pressing problems — and if we join hands to enhance each others' impact.

OUR
GROWERS

around the globe

Our field offices support smallholder farmers in three countries, and we partner with socially responsible organic growers across three continents.