As our own blogging picks up, I'm happy to share a little of the buzz going around about SAHA in the blogging world.

First up, my colleague Jackie DeCarlo, author of The Beginners Guide to Fair Trade, blogged about SAHA and how we connected over the internet. Read her post and check out her great fair trade blog here.

Next, a profile of SAHA from Zarah Patriana at the change.org fair trade blog, part of their Faces of Fair Trade series. Our fair trade face is blushing--thanks Zarah!

Stay tuned to the blog this week for the first in my upcoming series chronicling our international fair trade certification process.

Sharon

Needless to say, it's been a hard few weeks.

It seems like the worst is over now, but we will be feeling the effects of this war for a long time. In addition to the massive civilian casualties and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the rockets that continue to fall in southern Israel, the Israeli military offensive has made Palestinian-Israeli fair trade more difficult and more important than ever. In a visit a couple weeks ago, our friends at the Za'ytun cooperative in the West Bank shared with us their fears of how their political reality will be affected, and we all worry that we might have difficulty reaching them and bringing their products into Israel if the army imposes more restrictions on movement.

So we go to protests on the weekends and we scream for justice, but at the end of the day we know the best thing we can do I get up and go to work in the morning. Moving forward is all there is to do.

Yesterday, Avi and I went to visit Amna Kanan, director of the "For You" Palestinian women's cooperative in the town of Kfar Kara, about an hour and a half north of Tel Aviv. We went to talk about expanding the products we carry from the cooperative, and to pick up this shipment of 330 jars of delicious Syrian pressed olives.

This is how cool working in fair trade is. In our world, a business lunch to discuss product expansion means we show up at Amna's house to find an incredible spread of the most delicious Palestinian food you've ever seen, all homemade in Amna's kitchen and using ingredients produced by the cooperative. I would have taken a picture before all the food was gone, but we polished it off pretty quickly (note my empty plate in the foreground).

Amna showed us some of the potential new products-- dry goods like the brown lentils and bulgur wheat she used to make her special majadera (I convinced her to give me the recipe!) After discussing it together with Amna, the most promising product seems to be bulgur, which is made from wheat hand-picked while it's still green and toasted, ground, and dried by the women of the cooperative. The cracked wheat it's made from looks like this:

It's a long process to add new products to our line, and there are many considerations to take into account. In addition to Fair Trade and quality standards, we consider packaging, cost, labor intensity, the amount to coop can produce, what we think the Israeli consumer will buy, and many other factors. We work together with our partner communities throughout the process, and of course we'll continue to work with Amna and the For You cooperative on bringing bulgur to our line. In the meantime, we picked up the seven cases of olives, checking them for quality.

Order yours quick--half of this shipment is already spoken for!

Until next time,
Sharon

Read more:

For You cooperative

Syrian Pressed Olives

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