Capstone #4: My Site Visit

During my interview, Elizabeth Bennett told me that not a lot of people know about Fair Trade. I wanted to see if that was true. I decided that I should go to a chocolate store and ask the person if they have heard of Fair Trade and if they use it. I wanted to see if they just make some chocolate and sell it or, if they have any idea of the plight of the workers who make cocoa for their chocolate.

I went on my site visit on the 27th, Friday. I went to Chocolate Works, which is a shop that sells chocolate. Chocolate works is part of a a retail chain headquartered in Freeport, New York. I was going to see if the person who works there uses Fair Trade. I asked the person who worked there and she told me didn’t know about Fair Trade and she just uses the chocolate that the headquarters provided.  She didn’t know where the headquarters get their cocoa but she only knows how to make the chocolate.

I then decided to write to the headquarters of chocolate works about if they had Fair Trade chocolate or not. I’m still waiting for their response. I think that they will not reply because they probably don’t have it. I was looking for other Fair Trade chocolate stores in Westchester, but there are none. I found that Whole Foods carry one brand of Fair Trade chocolate and it is really hard to find it.

During my interview, Elizabeth Bennett told me that only 3% of the cocoa in the world is Fair Trade. So if there were 100 pounds of cocoa, 97 pounds of it would be non Fair Trade. I wanted to see if the people who worked at chocolate works would know what Fair Trade is. And even if they don’t have Fair Trade, they usually won’t know what it is.

I did some more research. I found Chocolate Works web site and I wanted to see if they wrote if they had Fair Trade or not. I saw that they didn’t. I think that more people should know about Fair Trade. Not a lot of people buy Fair Trade.All the famous companies, like KitKat, M&M, Hershey’s, Rolo ,Twix, Nutella and Crunch don’t have Fair Trade. At first I thought that they didn’t have Fair Trade because if the money. But then I realized that they also might not have known. It’s almost as if they don’t have Fair Trade at all. I realized that they couldn’t have not heard of it because they HAVE Fair Trade. (Just very very little.) Then it must be because of the money because to get Fair Trade, it costs a lot. This is what I learned from my site visit.