Fair Food Program label finds its first home at Whole Foods!

Posted on by CIW

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A point-of-sale display singles out Fair Food Program tomatoes in a Southern Region Whole Foods produce aisle. The sign reads: “Whole Foods Market was the first US supermarket to join the Fair Food Program.  As a partner, we pay a Fair Food Premium on Florida tomatoes that goes to the workers in the form of a bonus. All of our Florida tomatoes come from growers who follow the Fair Food Code of Conduct, which protects workers’ human rights, including safe working conditions, and a better wage.”

Fair Food Program label appearing in Whole Foods stores in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina today, will continue to expand where Fair Food Program tomatoes sold…

Just over one month ago we revealed to the world the freshly-minted Fair Food Program label, an attractive image of a proud female farmworker that declared that the tomatoes she picked had been harvested under the protections of the CIW’s Fair Food Program.  The logo — “Consumer Powered, Worker Certified”:

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Today, just over one month later, that fresh new image and logo are displayed prominently in Whole Foods stores throughout the company’s South Region, and will continue to expand through Whole Foods stores wherever Fair Food Program tomatoes are sold.  Here’s a close-up of the Whole Foods display poster:

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The appearance of the point-of-sale displays is truly a landmark  moment in the twenty-year history of the CIW’s struggle for a more modern, more humane Florida tomato industry.  In fact, it marks a sort of coming full circle of the Fair Food movement.  The movement was founded years ago on an alliance between farmworkers and consumers who joined voices in the streets to call for fairer wages and working conditions in fields once dubbed “ground zero for modern-day slavery.”  Workers and consumers marched together, fasted together, prayed together, chanted together, and stood together, shoulder to shoulder, year after year, determined to realize their common vision of farm labor justice.  And they would not be denied.  Today, the Florida tomato industry is recognized as “probably the best working environment in American agriculture,” and the Fair Food Program that was born of the farmworker/consumer alliance as “the best workplace-monitoring program” in the US.  

And today, consumers can walk into a local grocery store and find the fruits of their own labor available to them there — a new product, a better story behind the food, a Fair Food tomato:

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The Fair Food Program point-of-sale display appears, this time with an additional image from the CIW’s struggle for justice, in another Southern Region Whole Foods store.

It is truly a New Day, both in the fields where Florida tomatoes are picked, and now in the aisles, where they are sold.  

Look for the Fair Food label in a store near you if you live in the states of Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, or North Carolina.  And look for it in the months ahead in other Fair Food Program participating buyers’ stores.