The Spirit of Social Responsibility

BY DAN SADOWSKY
April 25, 2008
Country: India
Topic: Partners

Keith Hutjens' job as director of tea procurement has taken him to Assam, India, where he visited the CHAI Project. Photo: Courtesy Keith Hutjens

Portland-based Tazo Tea sources their tea, spices and botanicals from two dozen countries on six continents. Lemon myrtle from Australia. Chamomile from Egypt. Rooibos from South Africa. Rose hips from Chile. Cloves, cinnamon and black pepper from Indonesia. Premium teas from China, Kenya, Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka. Spearmint from right here in Oregon.

Keith Hutjens leads this worldwide buying effort as Tazo's director of tea procurement. His job comes with some enviable perks: He works in an office redolent with deliciously rich scents, gets invited to slurp and spit potential new products in the company's lab, and travels the globe meeting suppliers and sampling product. "We don't buy anything," he says, "unless we've tasted it first."

His trips to northeastern India and rural Guatemala include stops at the Mercy Corps projects that Tazo finances — side jaunts that he calls "probably the most fun and rewarding part of my job."

We recently talked to Keith about the roots and philosophy of Tazo's Community Health and Advancement Initiative (CHAI), its commitment to social responsibility, and how he sees both the company's charitable practices and its partnership with Mercy Corps evolving.

How did Tazo get into philanthropy, and specifically into a partnership with Mercy Corps?
For over 25 years our founder, Steve Smith, had been traveling to "origin" — which is the word we use to mean where we source our products from. Six years ago we decided it was time to act and establish a program to give back to the areas that have given us so much. We talked to a handful of NGOs and at the end of the day, Mercy Corps located in our own backyard of Portland, impressed us with what they had to offer. The CHAI Project is a unique program in that Tazo actively manages the direction of the project with Mercy Corps and tailors the programs to the needs in each area.

Why did you choose to give back in Darjeeling, followed shortly by Guatemala?
India and Guatemala are where we buy some of the largest amounts of tea, spices and botanicals; —Darjeeling is known as the Champagne of tea and is important to our product mix, and Guatemala grows lemongrass and cardamom, essential components in many of our products. So it was important for us to go back and focus on these areas.

How do you source your tea in a responsible manner?
Three things go into that. First, we are committed to ensuring a responsible supply chain through our membership in the Ethical Tea Partnership. And I can talk more about that later.

Second, from an environmental perspective, the Ethical Tea Partnership has just set environmental standards and tea estates will start being monitored against these. And here at home, we've made a commitment to purchase renewable energy certificates from renewable resources, like wind.

And then third is that social aspect of going back to origin and improving conditions there and creating more opportunities for families. That's what we accomplish through the CHAI Project.

How does the CHAI Project do that?
We do it in different ways in different places. In Darjeeling, we're focused on supporting social development projects which include improving water quality and accessibility, providing vocational and leadership training for youth; training community health workers to provide preventive, basic curative and referral health care to rural villagers.

"Community Action Groups" are formed in each community, and they're the ones who select the projects. It took a while to change the prevailing mindset — which was much more top-down — but we've empowered these groups to think about what their needs are and we've seen them take on projects that have made a difference in their lives.

In Guatemala, we're in 11 cardamom-producing villages outside Cobán, helping families diversify and increase their income through beekeeping or citrus trees or plantains or pineapple, and also establishing health committees in those villages so they're eligible for government funding.

Like what kinds of projects?
Well, in one Darjeeling village I visited, we helped replace a bamboo bridge with a stone one in a community that had been a part of a tea estate that had gone out of business. Spring flooding knocked out this bridge each year and added 2 ˝ miles each way for going to work each day or carrying in basic food needs each week. We've done several water projects with similar time-saving results.

And our program is very responsive. For example, we trained hundreds of young adults in job skills, but when it was hard for them to find jobs or start a business, we organized a two-day business training and put some money into micro loans. Soon we had 93 people take out loans of $75 to $100 with which they launched small enterprises such as animal husbandry or tailoring.

The other thing worth mentioning is that we've been able to leverage our own investments through our relationships with local suppliers. They voluntarily make contributions of 2-5 percent of the dollar value of the tea we buy from them. And since our business is growing annually by double digits, that's a significant amount of leverage.

And you recently expanded CHAI into Assam.
That's right. We'd wanted to do programs in Assam from the very beginning, but because of the political turmoil in that part of India it didn't feel right until recently. There we're focusing on economic development, because Assam has one of the highest unemployment rates in India.

So what is the Ethical Tea Partnership, and why did Tazo become a member?
The question for us was: How do you responsibly buy tea? The industry produces nine billion pounds of processed tea each year. Tazo accounts for less than five million pounds of that. Our buying practices don't have a huge impact on the industry, so we looked for an organization where we could leverage our purchasing power and have a broader impact.

Two years ago we joined the Ethical Tea Partnership. It's an alliance of 23 tea packing companies — including big ones like Tetley and Twining — that work together to ensure ethical sourcing and social responsibility in the trade. It's based in London, and it hires independent auditors to ensure standards are met in six key areas of tea estate life: employment (including minimum age and wage levels), education, maternity, health and safety, housing and some areas of basic rights — plus now the new environmental standards I mentioned earlier.

When tea estates don't meet ETP standards, or when they don't allow an audit, they come off the approved list. So we think they do a good job of making sure the tea we buy is responsibly produced.

A lot of coffee companies pursue socially responsible goals by increasing the amount of money that goes back into the pocket of the coffee farmer. Is there a similar model in the tea industry?
We haven't figured out a good model to get more money directly to the tea grower. Our parent company, Starbucks, has a system of transparency in place to make sure that money is getting to the farmer. But in Darjeeling and in Assam, for example, we're buying sometimes directly from estates, sometimes from tea brokers, and sometimes in auction.

There seems to be a trend of movement away from the British tea estate model, with more smallholders producing tea in areas around the globe. Smallholders normally produce tea on a few acres of land; they're growers who have up to 50 acres of tea under cultivation.

We're seeing that shift in Darjeeling. As part of the CHAI project in Darjeeling, for instance, we're supporting more than 200 smallholders through our partnership with Darjeeling Earth Group and their relationship with Organic Ekta.

How do you see your partnership with Mercy Corps evolving?
From the very beginning our goal has been to be a true partner in helping these communities, and the fact that we're going to these places every year to source tea and spices and botanicals makes it easy to be a part of that. It's allowed us to help Mercy Corps tailor programs and is the reason we're doing things differently in each area.

We hope to expand the CHAI project into a new region, perhaps Sri Lanka or Indonesia in the coming year as our tea business grows. We're looking at these and other places where we source products from and where Mercy Corps already has established programs, so that we can leverage our contributions and make the biggest impact.

  Print this page  |    Email this page

Donate Now

Program/Issue

Where Most Needed Emergency Response Gaza Crisis Congo Crisis Climate Change Fund

Amount (US Dollars)

$

Email Updates

Receive timely news, informative articles and commentary from around the globe.