FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Is Gnosis Fair Trade Certified?
WHAT THEY REALLY MEAN: How do I know Gnosis is committed to ethical responsibility and fair wages for the farmers?”
Free Trade, Ethical Trade, Direct Trade.... and Beyond (GnosisTrade)
Free Trade and Ethical Trade provided the first socially responsible certifications of certain standards in the 80’s and 90’s. At that time, they were groundbreaking steps in focusing people's attention on the fact that sustainable growth – the very health of our planet – is impossible if trade depends on exploiting the marginalized. Since then, challenges to sustainable growth have multiplied and become increasingly complex, making our insistence on high integrity standards even more crucial.
Our insistence on maintaining the highest ethical standards from bean to bar in these times requires Gnosis to define and verify our own high standards, and not look to (abdicate our responsibility to) third party certifiers that cannot know our industry as thoroughly as we do. We apply these extremely high standards to our practices, products, suppliers, ingredients, and to everything that Gnosis is and does.
Since day one, Gnosis has donated 10% of all profits to the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation and support dozens of local and international causes. By choosing suppliers based not on price but on alignment with our values and standards, Gnosis means to support a larger movement towards higher quality food, a more sustainable model for food production, and a more conscious model for business. I will continue to visit farms and facilities, work with industry leaders to develop new and ever more effective ways to assure raw integrity, and bend every effort to verify that my specifications are followed to the letter because nutritional and environmental integrity is the foundation of Gnosis. I would never put a product on a shelf that didn't embody these core values. These truths are embedded deep in my heart.
Call to Action
The health and environmental crises will only be solved when our collective individual efforts, including voting with our dollars, lead the food industry to follow our demands - and they will follow what you vote for. I sincerely believe it is a partnership between farmers, manufacturers, suppliers, and consumers that will ultimately lead to a healthier society and planet. Let's work with intention and action to fill those shelves with only products that are high in their integrity: I invite you to voice your concerns to merchants and their suppliers.
I hope that this blog effectively communicates Gnosis’s intensive quality assurance, dedication to transparency, and its overall mission and methods of honoring the planet and all of its inhabitants - present and future. I’m sure you join me in looking forward to the day when all stakeholders are similarly - and passionately - so dedicated.
It started with the Cat Cooperation Club...
When I was seven, I started the Cat Cooperation Club to raise money for a local animal shelter, and then, four years later, started the Desk Company to raise money for children in Africa. My fun was to create businesses as vehicles for my social action. The Cat Cooperation Club was the first and Gnosis Chocolate is the latest and, so far, the greatest.
...and grew out of my Holistic Health Practice
As a student at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in New York, I heard internationally-recognized raw food expert David Wolfe, extol the virtues of raw chocolate. “Maybe this is a way,” I thought “to replace my clients' sweet, unhealthy indulgences with a nourishing, satisfying, alternative that would improve their health and well-being!” I whipped up some bars (splattering chocolate all over my kitchen) and started giving them out. Did I have a clue it was the beginning of a chocolate company called “Gnosis?” Never.
Gnosis Chocolate is now my vehicle for caring for the Earth and Earthlings as we seek to help create a shift the marketplace towards shelves filled with only high integrity products. As a company we are inextricably married to ethical responsibility and fair wages for the farmers.
Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 3:49PM