The Fair Tracing Project

Over 1500 kids and their parents visited Royal Holloway’s Science Open Day this weekend. As part of Fairtrade Fortnight, Dorothea Kleine and Maria-Jose Montero organised the Fair Tracing section ot the event: Kids could vote which of the photos taken of or by our producer partners in India and Chile they found most interesting.

Two internet terminals allowed visitors to test out the Fair Tracing demo, typing in the barcodes from a bottle of Los Robles wine and a bag of Indian coffee. Our partners from Nokia had supplied us with a Nokia N95 which proved a great hit with kids trying out the barcode scanning feature on the Fairtrade chocolate bars we provided…and on the Ribena and Coca Cola bottles they had brought with them.

Maria-Jose had put together four short video-clips from our visit to producers in Chile which we showed in our very own Fair Tracing cinema. In the midst of all the buzz, we managed to have interesting conversations with people about their attitudes to Fair Trade, their own buying behaviour and what they thought of the project. Many expressed a desire to buy ethically but were skeptical about ethical labels and claims, including the FLO Fairtrade label. The issue of where information was coming from was key and there was great interest in the possibilities for alternative information dissemination Fair Tracing offered. Meanwhile, kids were learning about Fair Trade in school and asked for it at home. We gave away lots of free Fairtrade chocolate - in return for over 150 filled-out voting sheets telling us more about what potential consumers would like to see in terms of photo and video material on the Fair Tracing system.