Justicia, Bolton

02/10/2026

We're lucky to have a great relationship with Bolton MPs Phil Brickell MP and Kirith Entwistle

Bolton was once the biggest Fair Trade Town in the world and it's great to have such wonderful support from local decision makers as well as Bolton's local community

Tuesday marks the end of Fairtrade Fortnight. 🌍

Millions of farmers and workers around the world struggle to earn a decent living and support their families. Fairtrade is a global movement that works to improve the lives of farmers and workers by ensuring they receive fairer prices and better working conditions, while supporting more sustainable farming and communities.

It’s simple to support Fairtrade in our everyday shopping. Fairtrade chocolate, bananas and coffee are widely available in supermarkets, making it easy to make a difference through the products we choose.

Here in Bolton, we’re also lucky to have Justicia, Bolton in the town centre, supporting Fairtrade crafts including toys, toiletries and gifts. 🎁

Why not pop in and support them, or order directly from their website?

https://www.justiciafairtrade.co.uk

Every Fairtrade purchase is a small step towards a fairer deal for farmers and workers around the world. 💚🌱

01/10/2026

This Fairtrade Fortnight it's worth considering the difference between Fairtrade and fair trade. We're a fair trade shop because while our products are fair trade, only some are eligible for the Fairtrade mark

https://bafts.org.uk/fair-trade-vs-fairtrade-whats-the-difference/

01/10/2026

Today is International Coffee Day which is a great opportunity to shout about some of the farmers and workers who bring us our favourite brew.
One of our favourite Fairtrade coffee brands is Grumpy Mule - their distinctive orange packs really shine out from the shelves.
The fun name comes from the fact that coffee grows at such a high altitude that mules were traditionally used to bring the coffee harvest down to the lowlands for roasting or shipping. And the higher the coffee yield the grumpier the mule who had to carry it!
And it's roasted and bagged in West Yorkshire - although far be it from us on the correct side of the Pennines to suggest this adds to the grumpiness 😉
Our range of Grumpy Mule Fairtrade coffees includes single origin coffee that helps each community in different ways:

🇵🇪Peru - Food security. More income streams. Better schools. Healthier communities. The Fairtrade premium paid for this coffee backs the Café Feminino Coffee Project at CECANOR, where it’s grown, processed, and traded by women, and only women.

🇭🇳 Honduras - In La Labour, coffee isn’t just a crop, it’s a lifeline. It’s how folks make their living, and now, with this coffee, they’re diving into beekeeping too. That means more bees buzzing around, which means more biodiversity, better shade, more coffee, and more income for the farmers.

🇨🇴 Colombia - La Planadas has had its share of rough patches, with violence throwing hurdles in the way. But here’s the bright side - this coffee has been a game-changer, funding the construction of a testing lab that helps check and boost quality. Better quality means more cash in the pockets of producers. Simple as that.

30/09/2026

Fairtrade works

It's as simple as that

It works as a sustainable way for marginalised people to take control of their lives

It works because we can incorporate choosing Fairtrade into our daily lives

It works because we all understand that skilled work deserves to be rewarded, that work should be open to every adult, safe, and satisfying.

Simple, safe, and so satisfying.

29/09/2026

Brazil nuts are wild - quite literally. They don't like being farmed so every Brazil nut you eat has grown in the wild - usually in the Amazon rainforest - and been foraged. It's perhaps the most sustainable and certainly the most ancient form of plant based food. They are also slightly radioactive, so watch how many you eat or you'll be glowing!

Liberation Foods is an incredible company - working with nut farmers and gatherers in Bolivia, India, Malawi and Nicaragua - their chilli and lime cashews are a personal Fairtrade favourite. The Brazil nuts you find in Liberation's mixed nut packs are foraged by two groups in Bolivia

SEFENBO stands for the Sociedad de Exportación de Familias Extractivistas del Norte de Bolivia (Society of Exporting Families of Extractive Workers of Northern Bolivia). It is a Fairtrade-certified community association with a mission to protect the Amazon rainforest and its wildlife through responsible land management based on ancestral knowledge.

This Fairtrade Fortnight is all about people, planet and pay - and we can't think of a better way to encapsulate this than a group making such a small environmental impact alongside such a huge social impact

28/09/2026

Our supplier of the month for September is

The cocoa harvest in Ghana happens at this time every year and the farmers of Kuapa Kokoo who own part of the company are reaping the rewards

We have over a dozen different Divine products in store so get yourselves down to Justicia and show your support for farmers and workers

27/09/2026

Is there anything more gloriously messy than a ripe juicy mango? There are so many varieties of mango, not all of them travel well so you might find local mangoes when visiting Africa or Asia which are completely different from the ones we get here. Most mango growing communities will say they keep the best ones for themselves and frankly who can blame them?

But if you're craving the sweetness of mango and don't have a fresh one to hand, or don't want to eat a full one, dried mango is a great option, Tropical Wholefoods packs of dried mango come from Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in West Africa where they are starting to do things differently, The new young President Ibrahim Traore (he was born in 1988 which means he's about the same age as Kylie Minogue's pop career) took power in 2022 and is disrupting the old colonial attitudes and embracing a pan-African outlook, keeping the wealth in the country, building infrastructure and taking over key industries to stop extractive capitalism. This is the fair trade way.

Fairtrade dried mangoes are part of our dried fruit range which includes bananas and pineapples (more of that later in the week) Add them to your muesli for breakfast, dip them in chocolate or simply chew on a handful as a healthy sweet snack

26/09/2026

Fancy a cuppa?

In the UK we drink 36.5 billion cups of tea a year and only 10% of those cups are Fairtrade. But tea gives us an opportunity to look at one of the most infuriating things about how the global trading system is stacked against those of us who are trying to do the right thing.

Tea has to be picked and packed while it's young and fresh. PG Tips is so called because we only drink the very tips of the tea bush. It's also why the process is so hard to automate - choosing the perfect tips is skilled work and people like Sarita (the tea worker pictured) are highly skilled, work long hours with the tea basket slung across their backs or as here across their forehead to leave their hands free.

One of the hardest things to explain about Fairtrade is this: even though a farm or plantation may be Fairtrade certified, with all the decent pay and working conditions, labour rights and no nasty chemicals monitored and inspected regularly, that does not mean that the farmers and workers are paid on Fairtrade terms for every leaf of tea that comes out of the farm. In fact on average less than 5% of all the tea produced under Fairtrade conditions is sold under Fairtrade terms. So 95% of the buyers of Fairtrade certified tea are not committing to pay the Fairtrade minimum price, the Fairtrade premium and the small fee to license the use of the Fairtrade mark.

These companies are coasting on the back of the expensive Fairtrade system which guarantees that they won't risk the bad publicity of an expose of poor working conditions on their farms but they can get away without paying for this, so they do.

Shocked? You might need to sit down with a brew to recover. But make sure it's got the Fairtrade mark on the pack, and reward the companies who step up and pay for better working conditions.

25/09/2026

Fairtrade and bananas go hand in hand (a hand is the official term for the quantity of bananas we usually buy in a supermarket so this is actually a very good pun and you should all be smiling and nodding wisely and appreciatively right now)

But even more than appreciating wordplay we should all appreciate the work that goes into growing Britain's best selling fruit.

Bananas grow all year round and are picked and packed on site so there are lots of jobs on the average banana farm including like the women in this picture working to grade, weigh pack and sticker the bananas. This farm is Golden Exotics in Ghana where thousands of bananas are packed into boxes weighing exactly 18.6kg. There are around 3,000 workers on the farm who elect 30 from among their number to represent them on the Fairtrade Premium committee. This committee decides how to spend the Fairtrade and organic premiums that come in and are ringfenced for community development projects. These includes

👩🏿‍🏫 Onsite education for the children of the workers ranging from nursery to junior high school
🎓Bursaries for workers and their children who want to take part in further and higher education
🚌 Buses to bring the workers from the surrounding villages which can be rented out to raise more money for the community projects
🫗 Clean water for the surrounding villages - more villages are included every year and over 5,000 people now have clean water just because we choose Fairtrade bananas

So next time you go to peel your snack, marvel at how much good you are doing not just for yourself but for thousands of farmers and workers around the world