Sure, I did a kind of cameo visit with them for six months in 1992, and then came back full-time in early 1997. These three guys came out of the New England co-op world, the food warehouse scene, when they launched — and note this — on May Day, 1986. [Laughs.] They felt that workers in these food businesses didn’t have a voice so they hallucinated this radical model that probably none of them thought would actually succeed. But they just decided to shoot for the moon, with what was then the most radical capital model ever.

Absolutely. We trace our May 1, 1986 founding to the day U.S. Customs finalized released our first shipment of coffee from Nicaragua, using a loophole in Reagan’s embargo.

Right. I was very aware of this work because of my work with a national grassroots political organization called Neighbor to Neighbor, working to change U.S. policy in Central America, to stop the aid to the Contra militias, and shut off the U.S. gravy train to the butchers in El Salvador. A passionate Central American movement was going on at that time. I was working on the policy side while E.E. was trying to launch a business which benefited from this purposeful start, challenging the embargo.

Correct. Starbucks had launched back in 1971 and that led to a renaissance of specialty coffee — people really would pay up a bit for better quality. This was ironically very helpful for us, being in a fast-growing niche. It means you have more room for mistakes, given the healthy margins.

I think that for commodity foods, that’s right. I mean, we were years ahead of everybody else. And at that time, fair trade was not yet an idea whose time had come. Even the notion of free trade had not fully entered the American dialogue in the late 1980s, early 1990s.

I’d say we contributed to two things. First the growth of the organic coffee market—which Starbucks still doesn’t offer! And second, we helped move fair trade into commodity food products, beyond just handicrafts, like you see in stores like Ten Thousand Villages, which was founded by Mennonites, and SERRV, started way back in 1949 by the Church of the Brethren.

And we learned a lot from some alternative trade organizations — ATOs as they’re called — in Europe. They had started up before we did and already had established networks that gave fair trade a kind of infrastructure. But by the time a European umbrella group established a presence in the U.S., E.E. had been around about a decade. I think of us at E.E. as like people making popcorn the old way, cooking it over a fire, shaking things up and waiting impatiently for it to pop. It finally popped.

Yes, we built an ecosystem and we call ourselves fellow creatures of the ecosystem. And for years, E.E. was by far the strongest member of that ecosystem. And then we entered 2020, the year of Covid. And for various reasons, these other, much smaller and less financially stable members of our ecosystem performed better than we did! Which was great to see. Covid had winners and losers, of course. Like all the flour companies, once everybody started baking at home. Bob’s Red Mill — boom! [Laughs.]

I sure hope so. As a movement, we need to create a model which is tangible, inspirational, not a freakish one-off that makes people say, I could never do that.

You know, I give the three founders so much credit for their vision and the capital model. During my time as co-director, we tried really hard to export the revolution. “Here’s our bylaws!” “Here’s how we do it!” We don’t want to be this freakshow, this one-off. We want copy-cats!

I told people, let’s socialize this thing, help other companies, use company time on the clock, whatever. Like talking about this role for Class B non-voting preferred stock — which just didn’t exist out there in the social enterprise world.

So now we have 600 outside investors who’ve put in $17–18 million. No guaranteed seat on the board, no vote, no guaranteed dividend. It has been targeted at 5%, last year it was a little under 4%. It’s been incredible.

Depending on how that term is interpreted, we certainly advanced the concept in a practical way.

It has absolutely been a strength of E.E. that we have this external mission of helping small farmers stay on the land, of challenging the oligarchs, helping build market share for marginalized small-scale farmers. That brings many people to E.E. and the co-op structure is the icing on the cake.

I want to believe that co-ops in other businesses — that are just making widgets — could do the same. But I believe we have benefitted from having this dual mission, even if fair trade internationally doesn’t have much to do with worker democracy here.

It’s been a fortunate thing and it’s where a lot of our passion is. I don’t think we would be where we are otherwise.