The products behind UTM’s silver-level fair trade campus ranking
Exploring some of the fair trade products offered at UTM — and how good they are.
Listen to the audio version of this article here!*
UTM was the first campus in Canada recognized as a Silver-level Fair Trade Campus. According to Hospitality & Ancillary Services at UTM, this award was given due to the campus’ dedication to bringing “more Fair Trade products to campus to support awareness of Fair Trade brands.”
Fair trade products and brands must all follow the Fair Trade principles, which focus on ideals such as creating more opportunities for economically marginalized producers, allowing for equitable transactions between consumers and producers, and producing goods in a sustainable and climate-friendly way.
In the article below we talk about some of the fair trade products UTM offers. For a full list of products, check out this website: https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/hospitality/FairTrade#OnCampus.
Fair Trade Flowers at UTM
By Zainab Khalil
Flowers always brighten your day. They have a long-spoken language of their own with each flower symbolizing different emotions. Red roses often symbolize love, bluebells express gratitude, and verbena indicates creativity.
Flowers often appear in celebrations, such as graduations and anniversaries. It is a way of expressing your feelings when words alone are not enough. However, each stem has a much deeper story.
Before ending up in a bouquet in our hands, flowers travel through farms, packing facilities, warehouses, distributors, and store shelves. On March 18, at UTM’s fourth annual Fair Trade and Sustainability Market, fair trade flowers were present on campus.
Fair Trade Floral is a Mississauga-based importer and wholesaler founded in 2016. They offer fresh-cut and preserved flowers, including roses, hydrangeas, calla lilies, anelones and ranunculuses sourced from local and international farms. At UTM, they supply preserved roses at the Bookstore.
Behind the company is Afshin A., who holds a bachelor of science in agriculture with specializations in agronomy and plant breeding, alongside training in floral and event design, landscape design, sculpture, calligraphy and music according to their website. His experiences allow him to understand how to ethically source and distribute the flowers.
A flower’s journey gives it another layer of meaning. Through the availability of Fair Trade Floral on campus, students can trace a flower’s journey to a company locally based in Mississauga and connect with the people and places that shape them.
Camino: The source of our chocolate, sugar and cocoa
By Madhav Ajayamohan
Every UTM student has at least one go-to on-campus food or drink. That one item you immediately gravitate towards after a really tough midterm, or after a lecture where you had no idea what happened. For me, that drink is the hot chocolate from the Fair Trade Cafe in the Maanjiwe nendamowinan building.
I’m not sure when my relationship with hot chocolate began; I only know that it was some time in first year, and it’s a steady relationship. In fact, during my year-long internship away from UTM, one of the very few things I missed was the hot chocolate. So, I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that the hot chocolate was also a fair trade product by Camino.
Camino is a brand of fair trade and organic products by the co-op La Siembra. A co-op, or cooperative, is a business that gives each of its members an equal vote on how the business operates. La Siembra was established by Canadian entrepreneurs, who, after experiencing the exploitative nature of trade from trips abroad, sought a better path forward.
In fact, that’s where the name Camino comes from: in Spanish, it means path. Their website explains it symbolizes “the path that connects us all, from farmers to consumers and consumers to farmers in a social solidarity economy.”
La Siembra pioneered fair trade practices in Canada, and their website describes them as “the first registered importer of Fair Trade certified cocoa and sugar in North America.” Today, the co-op works with over 25 other producer co-ops from 14 countries, such as Togo, Madagascar, Panama, and Paraguay.
At UTM, all non-branded food services around campus exclusively use Camino cinnamon, coconut, chocolate chips, and brown sugar for their cooking. You can also find Camino chocolate bars around any UTM food court as well.
Inspired by this article, I tried the Mint Dark Chocolate bar with 67 per cent cacao. I quite liked the taste, and text on the wrapper informed me of the hours of work behind the chocolate bar I had acquired within a minute: the co-op Gebana Togo worked together with the cocoa-producing co-ops Scoops Procab and Scoops IKPA to produce this bar of rich pleasantness. The wrapper detailed how the bar was made, and how it was transported, providing full transparency on the production process.
If you are a fan of chocolate who’s interested in its production process, go ahead and buy one to support the many workers behind it! And if you’re not a dark chocolate fan, there are other varieties, like the Hazelnut & Salted Caramel Oat-Based chocolate bar with 43 per cent cacao, the White Raspberry Crisp White Chocolate bar, or a regular milk chocolate bar.
*AI-Generated Audio Transcription Disclaimer
The audio transcription included in this article was generated using artificial intelligence (AI) technology with the purpose of improving accessibility for our readers and providing an alternative opportunity to engage with The Medium‘s content. Please note that AI-generated transcriptions may contain errors or inaccuracies in pronunciation, wording, or interpretation.
The original written article remains the authoritative version of the content. If you notice an error in the audio transcription, please contact social@themedium.ca so we can for further reviews and corrections.
Features Editor (Volume 51); Associate Features Editor (Volume 50) — Madhav is a third year student completing a double major in mathematics and computer science, and a minor in professional writing. Everyone in UTM has a unique story that makes them special and deserves to be told. As the Features Editor, Madhav wants to narrate these types of stories with creative and descriptive writing. In his off-time, Madhav loves watching anime, reading manga or fantasy novels and listening to music.