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Our chocolate is NOT Fair Trade certified....here's why. The Fairtrade certification requires a $240 premium per ton of cacao. We voluntarily pay a $2,400 per ton premium, 10 times the Fairtrade requirement and almost twice the world market price. When we tell industry people that, they think that we are absolutely nuts. And maybe we are. But when you do all the reckoning and look at our retail price per ounce, our chocolate is not more expensive than many Fairtrade bars that you will find in the grocery store. How can that be? I love to answer this, because it gives a really interesting look at our food system and highlights how anybody can get higher quality food, at a fair price, and do right by the farmers who grow the food. Here is how the industrial chocolate food chain works, and this applies to Fairtrade producers too. A farmer harvests, ferments, and dries cacao. The farmer sells it to a local merchant who comes out to farms and buys cacao. The merchant marks up what he paid to the farmer and takes his inventory to closest big city. In the closest big city, another businessman buys cacao from a whole bunch of these merchants who go out to farms. He gets a load together and then drives all of his cacao to the coast. At the coast he sells his cacao to a big international distributer. Of course, before doing that, he has to mark up the cacao to make a profit too. The international distributor collects thousands upon thousands of tons of cacao all day every