Sainsbury’s Fairly Traded tea pilot
After water, tea is the most popular beverage in the world. Yet the tea industry faces unprecedented challenges, such as the effects of climate change, resource constraints and a shift in consumer demand and habit.
In 2017, we decided to start working more directly with our tea farmers in Rwanda, Kenya and Malawi to help them tackle these challenges.
The scale of our business means we can make a real difference; building closer relationships with our suppliers and offering them bespoke support. We’re focusing our resources on activities that will drive progress in the social, economic and environmental sustainability of farmers, workers and their communities within our global supply chains. We’re calling this the Sainsbury’s Foundation approach and it will be overseen by the newly formed Sainsbury’s Foundation Advisory Board.
The Advisory Board’s first mandate is to oversee the Sainsbury’s Fairly Traded tea pilot which we started in 2017, working with tea farmers to build stronger businesses and ultimately, more thriving communities.
“The Fairly Traded tea pilot builds on what we’ve achieved with the Fairtrade Foundation. The world is changing and the challenges farmers face are increasingly complex and we need to help. Our pilot brings more tailored support to our tea farmers – protecting all of their current benefits and adding more.”
Judith Batchelar
OBE, Director of Sainsbury’s Brand
We’ve spent a lot of the year working with various people from our tea packers to farmers and hired farm workers. We’ve tried to understand their challenges and where we are best placed to support. The pilot drives greater transparency, which was very limited in the tea supply chain – most growers did not know their tea was ending up on Sainsbury’s shelves. As a result of longer-term commitments and the additional benefits the pilot will bring above and beyond current systems, farmers in our Red Label tea supply chain have welcomed the trial.
Adding value from leaf to cup
Click image to enlarge
For more on these additional benefits as well as our key activities and learnings, read our
Sainsbury's Fairly Traded Report 2019-20
PwC has provided limited assurance over the calculation of the Sainsbury’s Fairly Traded Social Premium Funds
PwC's Limited Assurance Reports
Find out more about how we’re supporting tea farmers in Malawi
Sainsbury's Fairly traded grievance mechanism
We know it is vital for the people working in our supply chain to have robust mechanisms to voice concerns and opinions. We are working with the farmers in our Fairly Traded tea pilot across Malawi and Rwanda on an innovative approach to enable this.
In both countries, local parties receive information via Short Message Service (SMS) to dedicated local numbers, translate these into English and pass them to RightLine, our established grievance channel for Sainsbury’s colleagues and suppliers.
This channel has been extensively communicated through posters in areas such as tea weighing sheds where farmers congregate weekly. Over the past year we haven’t received many messages however, and are working with our partners to understand the underlying reasons for this.
Mobile phone farmer surveys
As literacy remains an issue for farming populations, we are also trialing Computer Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) surveys in Malawi. These have enabled us to reach a larger number of smallholder farmers than through traditional face-to-face surveys, in a way that ensures a greater level of anonymity. The first series of CATI surveys provided us with 216 responses, representing a 36% response rate.
The surveys are coordinated by Geopoll, a full-service research provider utilising a mobile survey platform that can be multi-modal and has extensive experience globally conducting survey research. We have partnered to capture representative data on farmer participation, and satisfaction with the Sainsbury’s Fairly Traded programme, as well as to share the existence of the grievance channel. Farmers can provide feedback through the surveys for free, with credit returned to respondents’ phones.
Breaking down information by gender
To ensure the priorities of the many female smallholders that grow our Fairly Traded tea in Malawi were represented, all data collected through these surveys was disaggregated by gender. This showed that female and male farmers, that represent 60% and 30% of the smallholder population respectively, both ranked farm productivity as their highest priority area, followed by access to electricity and healthcare. Their representatives, who chose which projects to finance with the Sainsbury’s Fairly Traded Social Premium, invested in fertiliser, rural electrification and school bursaries using this information.
Despite making up over 60% of the farmer population at the Sukambizi Association Trust, which represents over 10,000 farmers in Malawi, we noted that the share of female respondents to our survey was only 30%. This suggests that in households that only have one mobile phone, the respondents were disproportionally male. This highlights the need to hold individual, in-person surveys in addition to the mobile phone ones, which we have been carrying out through our partners on the ground.
To further support structures and projects that represent women farmers and their interests, we require that women be part of the boards and committees that decide on projects for producer organisations. There is also a requirement that they consult with the community in groups that include at least 30% of women.