Pioneer of Fairtrade, Albert Tucker has been instrumental for Karma Drinks to provide ethically sourced products all the while supporting communities.
Karma Foundation Chairman Albert Tucker has been a pioneer of Fairtrade, its importance, how the industry can create change, and how buying fairly sourced products can make a big difference.
Having worked directly with the foundation team in Sierra Leone and the communities it has supported, Tucker has been able to extend his work in fighting for better Fair Trade.
The Karma Foundation grew from the beverage company Karma Drinks. When the founders of Karma Cola used fair-traded, organic and natural ingredients to make a drink popular with customers, they found that big-name labels no longer used cola nuts.
Instead, it discovered that artificial flavours were used as a replacement, and the communities that grew the product, one of the most economically profitable in the world, received no income from it.
The search for fairly farmed cola nuts proved difficult for Karma Drinks, until Tucker’s homeland of Sierra Leone proved to be a valuable market.
"They were connected with me because of my Fairtrade work in the past. We talked about what they were trying to do, and I knew where we could get cola nuts," said Tucker.
"I knew that the best way for communities to develop is to actually have people collaborate and work with a wider group – rather than working with just one village. And so we found this community of eight villages that lives on the Tiwai island in Sierra Leone."
He said it was important for "Karma" to live up to its name in terms of the people it sold to and those who supplied it. The foundation has extended the principle of creating better Karma for those it works with and through fair trade.
"The initiative has played an important role in giving the training, support and place in the market to small farm organisations or communities so that they can engage with trade in a way that helps them do better."
Tucker began his career in Fairtrade through coffee. He was determined to find the answer to why coffee was produced by people who were overwhelmingly poor, yet it was one of the most valuable commodities in the world. He said this was what Fairtrade sought to change, and it was extended to other products like cocoa.
"These principles are critically important to Karma Drinks. The principles of making trade better and fairer for those involved in it, consumers and producers," added Tucker.
"It works both ways: for consumers, it's a product that hasn't got any surprises, is made with natural ingredients, is the best-quality product you can get, and has a good relationship with the suppliers."
