INTEGRITY is Our PRIORITY
That everyone, from our farmers to our customers, can feel good about where our coffee comes from and trust that every person, to the best of our knowledge, is fairly compensated and treated with respect.
We tend to think about integrity in terms of big decisions — the ones where it’s often easier to know what the right thing is to do.
But in reality, while integrity may be visible in big decisions, it is born and raised in the small ones. The seemingly insignificant choices that so often go unnoticed and unrewarded.
We’ve learned this the hard way at Wild Ginger.
We’ve learned that it’s really easy to throw that word around and even put it up high in your priorities, but when it comes right down to it, it’s often easier, quicker and seemingly harmless to cut corners or care less.
I remember one very specific moment when this concept hit home for me. It was the day that I thought I finally had this thing figured out. Finally had a way of getting the coffee here — not roasted locally, but here. Had figured out pricing and everything, even started getting the website ready to take orders. Than another shipping complication reared its ugly head and when I crunched the numbers again before bed it was working out that most of the money was going into shipping and in the end we would barely break even and there would not be much if any money to give to our sister organizations.
But I forged ahead.
We just have to start! I can’t wait any longer, I’m sick of it taking so long. We’ll just have to do it. I don’t want to feel like I failed again. This is the only way. No one needs to know how much shipping is, eventually we will be able to sell enough to bring the shipping costs down and give money like we said we would…
Frustrated, I went to bed -- but I didn’t sleep.
Integrity kept running through my mind.
How is this supporting our vision when most of the money is going to Fedex instead of our farmers and women? Am I sacrificing my integrity on the alter of my ego?
I mean, it wasn’t my fault that shipping was so expensive. What else was I supposed to do?
And that’s the thing about integrity. It doesn’t usually start as a question of right and wrong, but a question of good and best. And it’s costly.
The next morning I immediately sent a message to Cedric and cancelled the order. I had him send just a small amount for me to use at our launch event instead and resigned to the fact that we still could not in good conscience sell our coffee here.
I was disappointed but I reminded myself of the reason I started Wild Ginger Coffee in the first place and the conclusion I came to was that if we cannot run this business with integrity in every area, then we cannot run this business at all.
This is why, no matter the size of the profit, we will always give 20% to our sisters.
This is why, no matter how long we had to wait, we would not sell our coffee until we could find away to spend less on shipping so we can give more.
This is why, no matter how much time and energy it takes, we will always do our best to know the people we work with, and where our coffee is coming from.
This is why we call it Transparent Trade.
Because we know that talk is cheap and it’s easy to slap the words “fair trade” or “direct trade” on something — and lots of the time it’s true — but we believe it’s more than that. We want you to know what we know.
We are committed to being transparent about exactly where our beans come from and where our profits are going as far as we are able to understand it.
We want you to feel as good about drinking the coffee as our farmers feel about farming it.
So whenever we offer a coffee, you’ll find a full PDF on our website that tells you everything from the geography of the farms to the farmers themselves.
At Wild Ginger Coffee, we want to be people of integrity and transparency, not just in business but in life.
Transparency is not about knowing everything or sharing everything all of the time. It is about not having to hide anything.
We admit fully that we do not know everything, but we are committed to learning and not hiding or pretending.
To us, prioritizing integrity means prioritizing people and wether or not we always get it right, we want you to know we’ve done our very best and when you choose Wild Ginger, so have you.
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20% of all Wild Ginger Profits go directly to organizations locally and globally who are working with women in and exiting the sex-industry.
We are dedicated to ensuring that the farmers we are buying directly from are generously compensated and that each person in the process is treated like family, with dignity and respect.