Fairtrade Bananas: Farmers First Via Positive Disruption ft. Kim Chackal (Equifruit)

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you care about people and the planet. You, like me, have probably also felt the weight of learning about some of these very important but heavy topics. And as a marketer, we sometimes want to shout these facts and figures from the rooftop to get others to listen to the magnitude of the issue at hand.

But we also know that this can lead to paralysis by analysis and sometimes even overwhelm to the point of inaction.

So, what if we flipped our approach?

What if we found ways to bring attention to important topics in fun, vibrant ways?

Well, one company has managed to absolutely nail this approach.

And they are from what might be a very unexpected industry: bananas!

I first became aware of Equifuit, the Canadian market leader for fairtrade bananas, through their bright, almost cheeky social media. Think the latest memes meet bright bananas AND treating banana farmers fairly. Needless to say, Equifruit cuts through the clutter, and makes us feel good about positive changes.

Who is the mastermind behind this messaging? Meet Kim Chackal.

Kim is the Co-Owner and Director of Sales and Marketing at Equifruit. Over the past 9 years, she has established Equifruit as the Canadian market leader for Fairtrade bananas and her sights are set on Global Fairtrade Banana Domination. Her fearless and bold approach is making waves in the produce industry. In 2021, Kim was recognized as “Produce Person of the Year” by the Ontario Produce Marketing Association and in 2022 she was recognized as on The Packer 25 list which recognizes leaders, innovators and agents of change across the fresh produce supply chain. With 20 years of sales experience, she loves challenging people to rethink their consumption habits and consider Fairtrade as a sustainable solution in produce.

This is such a fun one and almost a marketing masterclass - I could have gone on chatting with Kim for hours.

I can attest that she truly is a Banana Badass!

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[Host: Lauren Scott] Welcome to The Resilience Report, Kim. I'm really, really happy to have you on the show today to talk about Equifruit.

[Guest: Kim Chackal] Thank you, I'm glad to be here, thanks for inviting me.

So, when I think of fair trade, I personally, and maybe it's just my own limitation, have always thought of maybe coffee or chocolate. I've never really thought of fruit and specifically bananas. So, can you help our audience and myself understand that world a little bit more?

Sure, well I'm glad that you think about fair trade sometimes. Some people have no idea what it is or have never heard of it and can intuitively think that it probably is something good for people in a trading relationship. But yeah, fair trade is very common in coffee and chocolate, but bananas, less so, and that's a problem, that's something that we really need to address, especially in the North American market. If we were in Europe right now that wouldn't be a problem. If you talk to somebody about fair trade bananas in the UK, for example, over 30% of the bananas coming into the UK are fair trade certified. Switzerland is over 50%, Germany is climbing, France is climbing. So when you go to the European market and you talk about fair trade in general, it's like talking about recycling. They get it, it's been part of their culture, it's been part of their education, but in North America, we're behind.

And you know, if you've ever asked yourself about bananas, why the price seems to never change no matter what's going on around you, no matter what's happening in the world, pandemic, inflation, economic crisis, that price of banana seems quite stable. There's a reason for that, it doesn't just magically happen. Farmers are really subsidizing the cost of bananas because the way that retail has been built is to use bananas as a low-cost item to set price perception at the store level. And so Equifruit is a brand of bananas that wanted to address this issue and start offering fair trade bananas to ensure that at the beginning of the supply chain, especially, farmers are guaranteed a fair and stable income, and that what we pay them for their fruit reflects the cost of sustainable production, which is seldom the case in the banana industry.

Often, if you're a banana farmer and you've been born into Guatemala, or Honduras, or Costa Rica, or Ecuador, for example, you're kind of just stuck, you really don't have a way out, and you're probably going to end up working in a banana plantation, and whatever you get paid, you get paid because it's that or nothing. And you're just stuck in this cycle of generational poverty. So fair trade certification gives farmers a way out and gives them the option and gives them the resources they need to grow their businesses.

And when I think of, so that was when I think of fair trade, and when I, I think of bananas, admittedly both you and I are in Canada, it's not the warmest, it's unseasonably warm today in Montreal, but I don't necessarily make the association between bananas and Canada. How did that come to be at Equifruit?

Yeah, so Equifruit was founded 15 years ago by a mother and daughter team who, bless their hearts, learned about fair trade bananas and saw a gap in the market here. They knew about the history of the large banana companies, which is pretty bleak, warning, in case you're going to go down that rabbit hole. And they wanted to open up the market for fair trade bananas. So, they just started to build their business by building demand because you can't bring in less than a full container load of bananas at a time, and to have a viable business, you need to have enough customers to sell a full load a week. So, they, they got started in the Quebec market, they identified a distributor that was willing to take them on. You know, despite the fact that nobody was talking about fair trade bananas, nobody was asking for it, and they found a bunch of smaller independent stores who were already familiar with fair trade and were kind of interested in that product. And it was those early adopters who allowed what was earlier called EquiCosta to get established in the market. And about 5 years later, the owner of the business, she was ready to retire and her daughter was ready to go back to school, and so they sold the business to our now president, Jenny Coleman, and she took that challenge on without having any background in produce whatsoever, but was the mother of three, entrepreneurial, driven, and excited by the mission of the brand, which was to improve the banana industry, which is no small feat.

Absolutely. And how do you go about finding and working with those farmers?

So, there are a number of farmers that are already certified by fair trade. Thanks to the development around the world, especially in Europe, we have a director of operations who's based in Panama, and he's worked in Fair Trade bananas for 25 years. So, thankfully we have him in the team, and he's familiar with so many different farmers and knows what to look for from a quality perspective and for just those right partnerships at the beginning of our supply chain. So that's been really helpful for identifying the right partners. And then I would say, you know, word, it's a small world, the banana industry, and word gets out there, and when you have a brand like Equifruit that is just dying to pay top dollar for your product, word gets out quickly. So, we literally have a waiting list of farmers that are dying to sell us their bananas and other products too. We get solicited from fair trade farms all around the world on a weekly basis, saying, you know, we have fair trade starfruit, and we have pineapples, and we have avocados, or coconut, and really for us, it's a matter of identifying partners that can take on enough volume so that we can be bringing in full truckloads and build a sustainable business model.

And you mentioned earlier that when the company first got going, there wasn't necessarily a huge market for fair trade bananas. What is the go-to market strategy right now? Do you sell direct or is it through retailers? What does that look like?

Yeah, so probably most of your listeners have no idea that bananas have to be professionally ripened. So bananas, when they're cut, when they're cut at source, it takes about nine months for a banana to grow so that it's ready to be cut. The bananas are cut green so that the beautiful yellow color that you see at your grocery store, that's not what bananas look like when they're harvested. They are dark green, they're very firm, the interior of the fruit is all starch, you couldn't peel the peel off at all, it's stuck to it, and it's just very plump and hard, almost like a baseball bat.

And when that fruit arrives in North America, wherever we're selling it, because it has to be, you know, comes in on a ship and then on a truck, it's about a two-week journey. By the time it arrives at our partners, we can only sell it to people and to businesses who have their own ripening facilities. So either that's retail partners, like here in Quebec, Sobeys has their own retail infrastructure, so we sell directly to their warehouses. Otherwise, we find distributors that have a great reputation in banana ripening because some are really experts and some not as much. So, we really want to find the best possible partners because that's such an important part of having a successful program at the retail level, is working with partners who know how to handle that fruit well.

It might sound crazy, and this is probably the first time that you or maybe your listeners are thinking about this, but it's really quite a process. So, the fruit arrives at the distributor, and while it's been traveling, it's been held at 14 degrees Celsius, which keeps the fruit kind of asleep. We don't want to trigger that ripening process. Once it arrives, once it arrives at our partner, we have to stabilize the temperature. Once the fruit is all uniform in temperature, it goes into these ripening rooms. They stabilize the temperature and then they begin the ripening process, which can be, on average, about a five-day process. And what happens in that process is the ripening team will use a combination of heat, humidity, and ethylene gas to kind of wake up the fruit and trigger that natural process that will convert the starch in the bananas to sugar. So, if you think of like a starchy plantain, that's kind of like what bananas are like, the ones that you buy at the grocery store before they go through this process. And the ethylene gas in the ripening rooms is the same natural gas that the bananas give off from the tops of the fruit, you know, at the pointy ends.

So in fact, if you ever want to slow down ripening at home, you can wrap up the top. I don't know if you saw on Shark Tank recently, they had this Nana Hat product where you can buy this adorable little plastic cap and then like a little knit thing for your bananas to slow down that ripening. And then there are other ethylene-emitting fruits, would be like peaches or avocados. So if ever you buy a bunch of bananas that are quite green, you can throw them in a bag with another gas-emitting fruit, and they should kind of work together as a team to develop flavor and develop sugar.

So all this to say, there's a lot of work that goes into getting that banana to that perfect yellow shade, and it's quite important to be looking for a fair trade banana because all the work that goes from the beginning of that supply chain to getting it to your warehouse. I'm sure that if we set up some like tourist tour where you could go visit the farms and see this whole supply chain, you would never ever be interested in buying cheap bananas again because it, you know, you just do the math, right? In Montreal, I can go apple picking, and I will pay more for the fruit that I picked myself in my own backyard than for a banana that traveled from thousands of kilometers away, and that was, you know, professionally ripened and all that hard work that goes into it.

So, I'd imagine it has to be a retailer that's at scale to be able to have that process down pat, or are there smaller players as well that have it? What does that look like?

Retailers will not invest in ripening rooms unless it makes sense for them economically, and for those where it doesn't make sense, they're going to identify the right retail partners. So, for example, some retail partners that we have, such as Costco, for example, they don't do their own ripening. They prefer to diversify that risk, and they work with third-party ripeners. Back in the day, it was only third-party ripeners who handled ripening and sold to the major chains. It's more of a recent development that all of the major retailers have said, hey, hold on, why are we paying for this? Maybe we could do this ourselves, and they've added that into their own existing infrastructure.

Well, I am definitely Googling ripening infrastructure after this call to get an idea as to what this looks like. I'm imagining these hangers full of fruit somewhere in Montreal, but a very, that's super fascinating. And certainly, the certification is core to the offering and the concept of what you're trying to bring to the market. For those who are less familiar, you touched on it a little bit as to what fair trade certification is, what it means, and there are also perhaps more local chapters, as well as that international umbrella. Could you help us understand the nuances between those different certifications?

So, there are a number of different fair-trade labels on the market, and since day one, Equifruit has chosen to work with Fairtrade International. You've probably seen them on a pint of Ben & Jerry's, or maybe if you haven't, then pay attention next time you reach for a Chunky Monkey, for example, you're going to see that Fairtrade trademark. So, we choose to have Fairtrade International because it is the most rigorous standards, and it's the best returns for the growers. So, we figure if we're going to build our business model on being 100% fair trade, we might as well feel great about it, knowing that we are doing the most and bringing back most value to the beginning of our supply chain at the farm level.

So, Fairtrade International is the only certifying body that's actually 50% owned by the growers themselves. They sit at the board level, and they help determine what fair trade minimum prices are and what standards should be, and they're, yeah, I love that they're involved in that process, and they review those prices every year to make sure that we're, we're paying a sustainable price for the product. And that's an important distinction against some other fair-trade labels. And I, and I don't bring this up because I don't want people to trust anything, but I think it's important as a consumer that if you're going to decide to look for a Fair-Trade coffee, or banana, or chocolate, the rule of thumb is kind of you get what you pay for. If it has all these sustainability and fairly paid claims but you don't see the certifications to back it up, well, you know, somebody might be marking their own homework.

So we prefer to be audited against a third party, and Equifruit as a brand is certified by Fairtrade International, and we only work with farms that are fair trade certified. That process involves a number of things, but just to distill it down to what's most important for the consumer to know, is that if you see the fair trade mark, and Fairtrade is written in one word by the way when I'm talking about the one we have, what that means is that Equifruit had to respect the fair trade minimum price for that country and for that commodity. So, whether we're buying organic bananas out of Peru versus regular fair-trade bananas out of Nicaragua, there are different minimum prices that are meant to reflect the cost of sustainable production in that country. And you can imagine, just think about the cost of everything, how that's fluctuated over these last three years with the pandemic, with inflation, the cost of inputs, the cost of trucking and packaging and fuel, these all have huge effects on the inputs for our farms, and that price really needs to be reviewed annually. I've seen other fair trade labels where they either don't have minimum prices or it's like negotiable, it's kind of whatever you were already paying, we'll pay you a little bit more and we'll call it fair trade. And I just, I don't like that. I really like to work within a framework that is clear, that the buyer, even at the retail level, can look and see what am I paying the farms FOB, so that's the price at the farm level, and I just like that transparency. And I think out of respect for the consumer, it's only fair that we work within that structure. Otherwise, it's just kind of greenwashing, and we're not really about greenwashing at Equifruit, we'd rather go all in and work harder to build the market but just to do it right.

That's so important, and you mentioned the word trust. I think that is just so key, as for us as consumers, with all the different namings, like even if you just take eggs, there are 35 different kinds of “certifications” as to what's available out there, and just understanding what that highest standard is for any consumer is so important. Is it fair to assume that because there's a higher price, for example, environmental considerations are also woven into there? I can only imagine if I'm a farmer and I'm getting paid a fair price, I'm also being mindful as to the ecosystem where this is coming from. I’m asking more because a lot of our listeners are coming in from that environmental lens, I'm just wondering if that plays into the certification as well.

Yeah, okay, so I'll touch on the environment, but I'll also touch on price too, in case people are like, "Oh, how much do fairtrade bananas cost? Are they $10 a pound?" The exciting thing is that fair trade bananas, Equifruit fair trade bananas, are still very affordable. We calculate that it'll cost the consumer about $10 more per year to switch to an Equifruit banana. So, if you used to pay, you know, 99 cents for a regular organic banana, and then you switch to Equifruit, it's maybe about $1.29, $1.39, depends on the retailer, each retailer has a different margin structure. In the States, you know, it's even more affordable because they're even closer, and we're working in US dollars, so an American would probably be paying between four and five dollars more per year for a fair-trade banana. Like, I just went to Starbucks the other day and spent $7.85 or something for a small coffee. I couldn't believe it. I'm like, "Okay, when did Seven Something become the price for the small," or whatever the Starbucks language is for small, I can never remember.

So, there's that side of things, just to scratch the curiosity of your listener, but then you're asking about the environment. So, I'll just go back to explain a little bit more about the fair-trade structure. So when we have fair trade certification, as I said earlier, Equifruit is respecting these fair trade prices. We also have to pay another price called the fair-trade social premium. So, it's not just enough to make sure that the farm is getting, you know, the price of the fruit reflects the cost of sustainable production, we also want to invest in building the infrastructure of the farm and their communities. So, we have to pay a fair-trade social premium, and this is the same structure whether you're buying Fair Trade coffee or tea or sugar or diamonds or gold or cotton or rice or whatever it is, fair trade minimum price, fair trade social premium. In the case of bananas, for every 40-pound case that we buy, we also have to pay $1 US. And that $1 US, the farmers decide democratically how to reinvest that money. It has to go into projects that have an environmental, social, or economic impact. So, they decide this amongst themselves, we have zero influence over how that money is spent, and then there is a full audit at the end of the year so that we can see the breakdown of that cost.

So on the environmental side, and our team visits our farmers every year, we do full reports, we take lots of pictures, we're very much connected to our farmers in all the countries that we work with, so Ecuador, Peru, Nicaragua, Colombia, Mexico. And there have been a bunch of cool projects like composting projects, also soil improvement projects where they're using scraps and composting from the farms themselves to create kind of these, almost like a sourdough starter for the soil, you know, to take back all those micronutrients and to put them back into the soil. Also, when bananas are growing on the plant, they have to be covered with a plastic bag, this is for organic or conventional production, and that's because it's a very hot, humid environment with lots of insects, so it's just a way to protect the fruit. One of the things that our farmers started to do, and you see this with other farms too, is they started to reuse those bags. They melt them down and turn them into pallet supports, so when the fruit is palletized, like 6 by 8, you have those four pallet supports, and those are now all recycled plastic bags. You need money to start projects like that and to have the infrastructure to be able to melt your plastic bags and turn them into pallet supports.

So those are just some of the ways environmentally that you can see some impact. But we get regular updates; our team communicates on Slack, and we get regular updates from the farms too on different things that have been done and built. It just motivates us to block out the noise and block out any negativity and anybody that's not ready to work with us right now, and to just keep getting people pumped up about what we're trying to achieve as a brand, which we say kind of tongue-in-cheek, 'Global fair trade banana domination.' That's like our high-level goal, you know. We want to all die one day knowing that we made a big change in the banana industry and that super cheap bananas are something of the past, you know, where we can say that we pushed so hard that the industry had to listen to us, and we are affecting change so far, and it feels pretty terrific, to be honest.

And it's wonderful that that change is at a local level. It's beautiful that it's not imposing out like the local Canadian vision of what would work but more allowing the farmers to choose what sense locally to them. I think that's super important, and you mentioned as well that we're seeing faster adoption of fair trade products, particularly bananas in Europe. Is that due to regulations, and do you foresee any regulations in North America, for example, having a similar impact? And I'll maybe just preface that by saying that I'm seeing that as a manufacturer where I work, that there are new laws coming in Canada in terms of labor standards for our suppliers, but I'm wondering if it's the same for produce as well.

Yeah, I think what got the European market to where it is, is I would dare to say, just a different culture and mindset. Of course, that varies greatly by country, but you know, I've seen pictures from European grocery stores where they show you how many miles each product traveled to be on the shelf there. So that level of awareness that will trickle down to decision-making is indicative for me that a program like fair trade would resonate with the European consumer. I think that there's a shifting mindset; it all starts with awareness and education. And that's very much a part of what we do at Equifruit. You know, we're not just selling a more expensive banana and hoping that the market cares. We do a lot in terms of advocacy. Jenny, especially and myself, you know, anytime that a university or college is looking to educate their students, or if there's an opportunity to speak at a trade show or at a conference about anything related to sustainable farming or fair trade, or even earlier this year, we were invited to speak at the Harvard Business School on a class about marketing socially conscious brands and how do you do that in a way that's actually effective so that a consumer understands your value proposition and is excited to pay a little bit more. So, I think that's a big part of it.

I think that with regards to government regulation in Canada, there are certain changes that are being made, you know, with regards to supply chain and what will be allowed and what won't be allowed. I don't think that change will happen overnight, but I think that this had to have happened in Europe decades ago, where it starts at a more ground movement level and then builds up from there, where you start to get the consumer to say, "Oh, did you hear about this? Did you watch that documentary? Did you read that book?" And that kind of turns into change at the retail level. Like the call-out that you made earlier about eggs is the perfect shining example. You know, we get to decide how happy that chicken was, but we don't get to decide how happy the farmer was who picked your bananas, unfortunately. And we've actually done slides in our presentation about eggs just to help the retailer understand. Like, do you understand because bananas are what retailers refer to as a known value item or a KVI. And this is like the number one reason that they won't want to buy a fair trade banana because they say that the known value items in the grocery world would be eggs, bananas, milk, bread, chicken breast, ground beef. These are supposed to be items that they think every consumer has kind of indexed in their mind of what is the average, like normal price.

So, let's say that you, just for an example, are expecting for chicken breasts to be $1.99 a pound. I'm just pulling that number out of nowhere; I don't know how much chicken breast costs, okay? But they think that I know how much chicken breasts cost, and if I go into their store and I see that chicken breasts are $3.99, I'm going to be like, "Wow, this is an expensive retailer. Everything here must be expensive. I don't think I want to shop here anymore." Or maybe that's not the case. Maybe I'm like, "Ooh, these are fancy chicken breasts, and that's important to me, and they must be better quality." But for the most part, they're worried that they're going to lose consumers if their known value items are higher at a higher index price point than the competitors around them.

But the thing that doesn't make sense is that when they present to me that rebuttal about bread, about eggs, about beef, about all those things, there has been so much innovation in those categories in the last 10 years, especially that they don't look anything like they used to. When I was growing up, you had a loaf of white bread and a loaf of brown bread, and over time we got really fancy, and we threw some seeds in there. But like now, you go to the bread aisle, and you have 50 choices based on how much bread you want to eat, whether you're keto or paleo or gluten-free, and all of that stuff. And we see it with eggs, we see it even in the meat category, right? Is this organic, is this conventional, is this grass-fed, is this grass-finished? All of these things that I'm learning as a consumer. But bananas are really the last one. So a lot of the buyers that I meet with these days who are on the younger side are like, "Oh yeah, we really should revisit this." And you know, one of the large Canadian retailers recently, their new head of sustainability went to the produce department and literally said, "Why don't we have fair trade bananas yet? Like, that's a thing now in Canada, and we're kind of behind on that." And then they called us up to have a meeting. So, we are seeing some change there, but it's still a bit the dinosaur age when it comes to how bananas are purchased.

And I would have thought, I guess I never knew the term of known value item. I would have assumed it was only products that were perhaps grown or made locally in Canada that could be maybe offset with subsidies to ensure that, I guess, maximum price. I'm sort of surprised that something that we're importing is also in that category. I mean, it's wonderful, probably in the sense that it means that the demand for bananas is that high. However, would have thought it was something that maybe then the government could compensate with retailers with through subsidies. I'm a little bit surprised to hear that, but it's true that I do know the average price of bananas at any one of the stores near us as well. Very interesting.

Yeah, it's also because bananas have traditionally just been used as a loss leader, you know. They bananas represent about 1% of grocery store sales. It's a very important category for a grocery store, so if they're going to make a change on that, it's a big deal, right? And if the fear is we're going to lose customers, it's a big deal, right? For 1% of the entire, think about how many thousands of things you can buy in a grocery store these days, and that one item represents about 1% of store sales. So it's huge, it's huge volume. And the way that we see it at Equifruit is they have an enormous opportunity to affect change, and they have an enormous opportunity to position themselves as a responsible retailer on such a highly visible category. If you want to speak to all of your consumers directly, you know, these days we're on to the digital apps, and a lot is happening in the digital space, but really just put a sign up in your banana section, and you're going to get almost 100% of your consumers on a weekly basis. There's no higher frequency touch point in the whole grocery store.

Food for thought, pun semi-intended there. You mentioned at the start of the call that you've been with Equifruit for just over 9 years, and then more recently you've become co-owner with the organization as well. Can you share a little bit more about that journey? And if we have other listeners who are perhaps working at an organization or considering making that jump, if you have any advice for them as well?

Yeah, so yeah, I just celebrated nine years last week, the eighth was my Bananiversary, and the week before that on the first was Jenny's official until 10 years as owner and president of the brand. So yeah, it's been an exciting change, something that was on Jenny's mind, and something we started to talk about more formally about two years ago. Our business for the last two years has been in the Globe & Mail’s top growing companies in Canada, and before we really got into that big momentum of growth, I mean we've been growing year-over-year, I think 27%, so we've had really steady growth for the last decade. But it was a conversation that I brought up because I was thinking about the trajectory of the business and what my professional goals were. So, it's actually a conversation that I initiated because I've always been entrepreneurial and I've always thought about starting my own business.

But when I got connected with Equifruit and I learned about how many banana farmers are really suffering to produce this fruit that we don't think twice about that we just put in our baskets and we don't even feel bad throwing out half a banana, it's like because we just know that it's so cheap, right? When I started to learn about really the plight of banana farmers and the history of the large banana companies and how they came to be and the practices that are still going on till this day in certain cases, I just thought, what better use of my abilities in sales and marketing than to try to blow this up? So I think that if you are already within an organization where you feel connected to the product or service, and it's something that you wake up excited to advance, then you'd be surprised perhaps by the response, as long as you are delivering value and adding value to the business then I think any smart business owner should think about bringing you in on a partnership level.

For me, it represents a big shift in my career. I feel like I now know what I'm going to do when I grow up, you know. I'm like, okay, I get it, this is me. I've been really committed to this for almost a decade now, but I feel now like I can really think through the rest of my career path. And I no longer have to use that note section on my phone to think about what if I invented this, you know, my mind is like a hamster wheel, it's always thinking about improving this and that, and I can really just drill down into bananas. So I would encourage anybody to approach leadership with that opportunity and to be patient because maybe you would be the right person, but it's not the right time.

It's definitely given me an appreciation ever since that development to think about the way that decisions are made for a business. And ultimately, the culture that we're trying to cultivate at Equifruit is a place that we would want to work, right? So, it kind of started with one of the things that attracted Jenny to being an owner was just knowing that she was a mother of three, knowing that you need flexibility as a parent, not just as a mother, but as a parent. You need flexibility; you don't have any control over when your kids get hand-foot-and-mouth disease, that's not a fun surprise, and it happens to parents on a monthly basis. So, to be in a work environment that's just understanding that life happens and that we're going to get the work done when the work gets done, and some weeks are slower and some weeks are intense, and it all comes out in the wash. That's just a nice way to wake up and go to work rather than this really top-down approach of like, this is how we do things here, and you either fit in this mold or you don't. It's much more of a collaborative experience, and it always has been. And I'm sure that, you know, as we scale the business, we'll be presented with new challenges, but we're trying to keep our minds sharp. We're trying to stay connected to other business owners and glean from their advice and try to be open and transparent, and not necessarily always act like we know exactly what we're doing.

I've had a couple of people reach out to me recently who are now in talks with leadership because they've been offered a partnership, and I think the advice that I give really is to know your worth. Don't be afraid to stand up for yourself in negotiation, really think hard about how you've contributed to the business and what you're willing to put in in the future. And if it's an exciting opportunity for both sides, then it'll work out.

These are such great tips, and you can see that you've really been processing as you mentioned over the past couple of years. And having just celebrated your 9th anniversary, are you working on any projects right now that you're particularly excited about? You mentioned scaling; is there anything that you can publicly share?

Well, after nine years, we've just hired a new salesperson, so I'm actually starting to build a team. I'm going to start spreading out that responsibility because my official title at Equifruit is Director of Sales and Marketing. This is a big deal for us. You know, we invested heavily in our operations team. Our operations team is like four times the size that it used to be, and that means that it used to be like one person, and now it's four. So we've come to a place where our budgets just keep growing every year as the business continues to grow, and we just know that investing in the right opportunities and in the right people will be important for the growth of the business.

That's just a personal announcement, other than that, we've been growing steadily in Canada. You can now find Equifruit bananas in two-thirds of Canadian Costcos. So, we broke into the western part of Canada earlier this year in Calgary and Edmonton, and we're continuing to talk about growth. We broke into the US market with Costco around the New York area, Long Island, Brooklyn area, and our focus is very much on continuing to expand in Canada and continuing to expand in the US. We feel like there's been this shift, especially this year, where we've been at a couple of trade shows where some major retailers have started to approach us and really pay attention to what we're doing. And I don't know if that's just like the Costco effect, you know, that once you're in and growing and scaling with Costco, it's like, okay, you're a credible supplier. Or if it's more just the really fun and innovative marketing that they're really into online. Because if you go on to the Equifruit website or you follow us on social media at Equifruit, it's a really fun follow. It's unlike any produce brand, if any of you are following any produce brands out there. We have lots of memes and fun content that'll make you laugh, and I think that that's really resonating with the industry.

I would love to dive into that a little bit further because when you're in the environmental or social impact space, there tends to be, I guess, this desire to communicate the problem. You want to say like, these, this is everything going wrong, this is how we're fixing it. But Equifruit has taken this serious topic but found a way to be fun and almost cheeky in marketing. What made you take that approach because it is so refreshing, and it is really fun to follow your social, and it makes you want to then go buy the product. So, I'd love what that thought process and journey has looked like.

Oh, thank you for saying that. We didn't always look this cool. When I first came on, one of the first projects I was part of was redesigning the logo of the company. The company had officially been changed from EquiCosta to Equifruit when Jenny came on, and then we were like, okay, we really need to rethink the logo because our first logo looked like broccoli, and the company was called EquiCosta; everybody thought the bananas were from Costa Rica. It wasn't, it was a mess, just a hot mess.

So, really, we spent the subsequent first six years of my career with Equifruit, we had our own website, we were contributing to it, we were making a couple of improvements here and there on packaging, and it wasn't until COVID hit where the world stopped, all the trade shows got canceled. Thankfully, we were working with bananas, which were just flying off the shelf, so our sales lift was tremendous, and we had this influx of cash. We were just in this very fortunate position, and so right away, we sat down as company and said, okay, what does the rest of this year look like? We obviously can't be traveling around to pitch customers, and people are starting to meet virtually online, but the world is changing, we don't know how it's going to settle.

On the marketing side of things, I had been promoted from sales to director of sales and marketing the year before, and I said, look, I'm alone on the sales side, and the packaging of our fruit, the website, social media, these are all supposed to be an extension of the sales team, and they're not helping very much. We were talking so much about the problem; like the banana industry being a hot mess and its terrifying, horrifying history, and it was so heavy when we were talking to retailers about that stuff. I mean, we weren't just talking about other businesses, that's not our approach. We don't just go in and talk disparagingly about other banana brands, but we can all look up the history of the banana industry and how bananas became so readily available at such a low cost.

So, we had to say to ourselves that when we leave a meeting, if we just keep getting congratulated for our passion and the sales don't happen, something's wrong. Obviously, we've converted one individual deep in their heart, but that's not going to move the needle on volume and impact for growers. So, we decided to hire a marketing agency. You need to sometimes work with a fresh set of eyes to look at the whole thing and answer all their questions and help them point you in the right direction. We found this amazing agency in Montreal called Tux, like tuxedo, but Tux Creative Company. They were already buying our bananas, but they didn't realize that they were fair trade, so that's a red flag right there, right? It's like right on the packaging.

And they were really excited to work with us, and it was a major investment. I won't say it wasn't. It was a huge, big, scary investment at the beginning, but I mean, we wouldn't be sitting here today and talking if we hadn't worked with Tux because they saw the approach that we took, they saw the packaging, they saw the website. And what we realized was that people were hearing what we were saying, they understood what we were trying to do, but we weren't giving them the tools to move the product. So, we can't be standing at every banana stand around the world getting every consumer excited. Your packaging is your sales team, your website is your sales team, your social media is your sales team, and if it doesn't grab your attention and speak to you, then it's not effective. And this can be pretty tough in the world of marketing, you know, especially if you're working in like a family-owned business, people have a lot of opinions, or if somebody feels like they're the creative voice in a business and they've done a lot to put it into it. You just have to get real with yourself. If it's not working, if your sales aren't growing, your marketing is not working. And it doesn't mean that you've had bad ideas, but sometimes the most simple tweaks can change everything.

So, for us, we shifted away from the doom and gloom, the banana industry is a hot mess message to let's think about how we can get people excited and let's surprise them and make them laugh and make this very light-hearted because we're talking about a really hard, difficult industry. You know, bananas haven't really had their, you know, if I had to liken it to like the Rana Plaza moment years ago, where all of a sudden, the whole world was like, "Wow, fast fashion, we're paying the price, these producers and these factory workers are paying the price for our desire for fast fashion." And there was this global awareness that happened almost overnight. And somehow, even though this has been going on for over a hundred years where banana farmers are really exploited and they work in terrible conditions often and they're not paid well and they're stuck, we just haven't seen that, we haven't had that moment where it's on people's radar. So, we just needed to find a way to do this in a way that would get people to stop and get excited.

So, if you follow us on a trade show floor, we're all in our Banana Badass jumpsuits. Banana Badass is the term that we decided to coin that represents not just our team but anybody who believes and supports in what we're doing, anybody that buys from us. This kind of community that we're building. And we like the word badass because it immediately tells the consumer that we're doing something out of the norm, you know, something that takes bravery and courage because it does take bravery and courage. And we have just a very fun approach. We realize that humor breaks down barriers much more than bad news. So, we have like a six-foot shark in my office right now. There's a six-foot shark at our trade show floor. We wear these bright yellow Crocs, and people are just getting into it. They get excited to see the Equifruit Banana Badasses because every time that we're at a trade show, we always try to do something new and exciting, and people just want to have fun at work. So, we're kind of serving that while educating them, and I know that that's just going to continue to affect change over time.

Definitely eye-catching and empowering. I love the term badass because I think there is an empowerment part of that term as well. If - we do have a considerable amount of our listeners who are entrepreneurs or more in that small to medium-sized business - if they're mindful of their marketing budget and but they do recognize, okay, maybe what we're doing is not working, would you recommend? You've talked about a couple of different tools like trade shows, websites, maybe enlisting the help of a marketing agency. Is there one area that you'd recommend they focus on more than another?

Yeah, well, if you're a small to medium-sized business and your budget is really low, and we've been there, you know, for the first number of years, it was like, okay, we're going to spend $5,000 a year on marketing, and then it's $10K, and then $30K felt huge. And up until COVID, our budget every year was $30,000 for marketing. I could spend that in like five minutes on ad space on one website of one retailer. I think that go with what's free or inexpensive to start. You know, start by talking to consumers, you know, depending on what product and service you're offering, ask them their opinion. There's nothing wrong with, like, if you sell a product in a grocery store, for example, go stand next to your product and talk to 100 customers and just say, "Hey, I'm the owner of this business, and I'm just curious to know what you think of this packaging," or leverage social media. Social media is a godsent when it comes to free marketing. If you are not familiar with which platforms you should be on, all of this information is available online. So, we know that we're going to have the most traction on Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn, and we've moved away from investing in Facebook and Twitter because that's just not where our audience is all the time. So, we're more selective. So, we paired down a wider social media budget to the platforms where we know we're going to have better engagement. And I think that on social media, you can get a lot of information from just asking for free. There are also different survey companies in Canada that will actually survey customers for you, and it's relatively inexpensive. So, let's say you're testing out packaging, or you're testing out messaging, use a survey company and try to get a representative sample in your market so that you know what matters to the consumer in the market where you're selling that product. You can't take U.S. data and apply it to Newfoundland. It's just not the same consumer. And you've got to be real about that.

What else? I mean, I think that's a good start. If you can go to a trade show, then figure out what is the most important trade show that you have to go to for your industry, and you just start with one, and eventually it's two, and eventually it's three, and then you're just figuring out from there. Do I, how many do I need to go to in a year? What's actually going to, how am I going to quantify that ROI, how can I guarantee an ROI on that investment? And you know what, I find that generally, people are very generous with their time and information sharing too. So if there's somebody in, you know, obviously not your direct competitor, but if there's somebody in your same space, like if I saw another produce brand that I thought was doing a great job, you'd be surprised. Reach out to their marketing team, compliment them on, "Hey, I noticed you did this," or "I noticed you did this contest," or "You worked with this influencer. Do you mind if I asked how much that cost, or if you have any suggestions for me on what would help me save money and be the most effective?" So you have to go out there and hustle and ask people for information. Don't be shy or afraid to say that you don't have it all worked out. People are generally super generous with their time.

I think those are all great tips. I had not thought of the survey piece. I think that's really great, and definitely reaching out. I have to admit trade shows, I was a little bit of a non-believer prior to the pandemic, and then having a couple of years there where we couldn't go to trade shows, you realize how important it is just to see what are the latest trends going on. And then, to if you can only travel once a year, maybe it's that opportunity to have everybody come there. So, I completely agree with all of that. Definitely, I think it's going to be great for everybody to check out your social media, see what's going on there.

You did mention earlier that you've always felt like you had this entrepreneurial spirit, and that to the point where you're taking notes down as to what could be your next invention. Did this start as a kid, or where do you think that journey started for your interest to have that entrepreneurial angle?

Yeah, I've always been interested in business and understanding how businesses work. I think that probably came from the fact that both my parents immigrated to Canada, and I heard a lot of the stories of like, you know, walking X number of miles through the snow to save X number of pennies. And so, like growing up as a child, we would even drive to the U.S. to buy our clothes because it was so much cheaper there. And my parents would buy a lot of things in bulk and discount, and so from a young age, it was kind of ingrained in my mind, like you have to be careful with your money, you have to make strategic decisions. And my mom, who stayed home with us growing up, she was always very business savvy, and she would always talk to me about packaging and networking, how networking was so important if you're ever in business. It's all about who you know and developing relationships. So, thankfully, I had, and my dad, he started his own business. He's in recruitment since I was born, so I have been around people who are curious and who took chances. And I think that that inspired me, but I think each person is just wired differently. You know, like I, my brain, I was just in New York City last week at a trade show, and I'm sitting in a Broadway production, and before the show starts, I'm sitting there, and I can't help myself. I'm thinking about how much my ticket costs, and then I'm counting how many seats will go across one row and roughly how many rows are there, and so how much money are they making on an average night? How much do I think the performers make? And what does it cost to put on a production? Like, I can't go anywhere without my brain. That's just how my brain works. Like, is this a sustainable business model? And always thinking about how brands can deliver value and surprise and delight their customers. I've always loved marketing, and I just, and I've always loved communications and marketing and advertising. It's just kind of a fun industry, but as I got older, I realized, I don't want to just trick people into buying things that they don't need. What really excited me was, okay, how can I use these talents and this curiosity and use it as a force for good and think about getting involved with a business that's a force for good? So when the opportunity came to, and I met Jenny, and we just started talking about her business, I was like, well, this is exactly what I've been thinking about doing. I'm ready to make this shift in my career and try something new, even though I knew this much about, I had the same questions as you, like what is a fair-trade banana, and why do we need it? I didn't know anything about it, and within a, within like an hour, I was just totally sold.

And if some of our listeners, I think 2020 was a catalyst moment of people switching either to values-based organizations or just setting out on their own and becoming entrepreneurs. Do you have advice for those who are maybe at that mid-career point and are thinking of making the jump, either to go be a leader at one of those organizations like Equifruit, where there is that deep value, values-based thinking, or even starting something on their own? Do you have any advice there?

Yeah, I mean, life's too short to have major regrets, and every new big decision is scary, no matter how experienced you are or how successful you've been. We have no intention to sell our business, but let's say tomorrow we sold Equifruit and all of a sudden Jenny and I, these two women business owners, were starting from scratch. We would be terrified to start whatever, let's say we wanted to do some new produce brand or something new in the food and beverage space. We'd be back at square one, sitting at the drawing board, thinking okay, how much money are we willing to take out of our own savings to invest in this? And should we go to this trade show? Does it make sense for us to pay the $150 a ticket to go to the cocktail at the trade show? That's a lot of money. Yes, go to all the things. If you invest wisely at the beginning of your journey, it's going to cost money but invest wisely and be a good networker and follow up and treat people the way that you want to be treated. And leverage the free tools that are out there, like LinkedIn is just a godsend. Can you imagine, like back in the 90s and early 2000s, we didn't have tools like that, you had to go to the Yellow Pages and figure things out. I was just training this new salesperson this week, I had gone to this beautiful grocery store in New York City last week called Morton Williams, like okay well let's do some research to figure out who's Morton Williams. Within three minutes we had the name of the director of fruits and floral. You know, you just Google this, Google that, go on LinkedIn, and bam, I've sent them a message. Yeah, so there's no excuse, you just, if it's scary, that means it's probably the right decision. Just go for it.

The great recommendations and when you're mentioning as well that if you start going down the rabbit hole of the banana industry it can get a little bit heavy sometimes. When you do find yourself going down that path, do you have anything that helps kind of bring you back up and recommit to the work? Do you find that you do find yourself getting to that space or have you almost created this culture around you that those moments are fewer and far between?

Well, I mean, I guess I'm lucky in the sense that when I do go down that rabbit hole, you know, I saw a headline on my LinkedIn the other day that a union leader who works in the melon industry for one of the big multinationals was assassinated, this female union leader, and I'm like oh, it's just affirming like the work that we're doing at Equifruit, it's not for something that happened 100 years ago and now we're trying to leverage it to look like a sustainable business model. There are dangerous and dark business practices that are going on behind the scenes keeping banana prices low, and it makes a lot of people uncomfortable what we're trying to achieve as a brand. But my discomfort is nothing compared to the thousands of banana workers who have no electricity, who live in conditions that would just make you cry. It's really tough to go down and see how many agricultural workers live. They don't have many options, they don't have the same government infrastructure, you know what happens if you get pregnant, is there a maternity leave? No. I'm not saying this for all companies, but the infrastructure that you see with fair trade farming is just built on a foundation of treating humans the way that you would want to be treated.

And doing business. We're a private company, we want to make money, we're doing it within an ethical framework. And at the end of the day, the conversation that we're having with retailers is not about like what is this funny cute, adorable Equifruit brand think about what the industry should do. It's about getting people who have been in the industry much longer than we have, sometimes 40, 50 years I meet buyers who have been in produce, and to just say okay look, we weren't responsible for how this all started, but this is where we are. It's 2023 and the average Canadian retail price for bananas is 74 cents a pound and the average price for apples is $2.99. That's a huge disconnect. So, we all need to start by agreeing that we have a problem here, and this is not about supporting a brand like Equifruit. When Equifruit is going after global fair trade banana domination, we know that that means we have to encourage the large multis to also adopt a fair-trade strategy. It's not going to happen overnight with one company. We're basically the loud badasses on the loudspeakers that are saying this is a problem. It's so affordable for us to fix it, we basically just need to reset the way that we think about banana prices. 59 cents a pound, 64 cents a pound, 79 cents, those prices do not serve banana producers at all. We need to increase prices by at least, you know, 20, 30 cents a pound, which is nothing relative. It's still going to be the cheapest fruit in your basket, but the impact will be tremendous, and we just need to move on. It was a dark blip in the history, but it's something that we can fix in our lifetime.

You've shared so much information with our listeners, I've learned a ton just in speaking with you today. If people want to continue this journey of learning more about Equifruit, where would you encourage them to go?

 Well, we have a great website. It's designed to feel like a video game. Your mouse is going to turn into a shark, you could eat the Equifruit banana, you just go on to www.equifruit.com. And I've mentioned the social platforms that we're on, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, we're all @equifruit. Those are going to be the two best places to learn more about us.

Otherwise, our website has a great couple of resources on there. You can learn more about the history of our business. We just actually added a whole section of our website where you can see all the different awards that we've won, and as a women-owned business, we put in a lady boss section award for all the awards that Jenny's been winning, and that we've won as a team. So, it just helps you understand the steps that we've taken maybe and that would inspire you in your journey. I think another point going back to kind of free marketing, nominate yourself for awards. You'd be surprised how many people don't do that, and we've just been crushing it over the last three years because we're like, we check so many boxes right. We're 100% fair trade, we're now officially certified by We Connect as a women-owned business, we have Organic certification, there's all these environmental and social and economic impacts through the fair trade system, and so it's really cool to see how the industry might be looking for exactly what you have to offer. Jenny was just named the RBC Women of Influence a couple of weeks ago in Toronto out of 11,000 applicants, so that's a really big deal. So yeah, check us out online, and I'm on LinkedIn all the time, Kim Chackal. Look me up if ever anybody wanted to grab a coffee on Zoom, and you're more, hear me blab on about bananas, I'd be happy anytime.

Well, thank you once again, and we do like to end every episode with the same question, which is, what do you think it's going to take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward?

I think that bravery and resilience go hand in hand, and that would be the first word that comes to mind. You know, the tough decisions require bravery, whether that's going out on a limb because you think that this is the right thing to do, or saying the thing that nobody else is comfortable saying. Just call it out so that you can just kickstart that change. Bravery is part of business in a big way. I think the most successful entrepreneurs were really brave, and especially in those early years. Just being an entrepreneur waking up in the morning and deciding that they're going to just follow their dream, that requires bravery. So bring other people in your circle that can support you in that.

Thank you for today, thank you for everything that you do, that Equifruit does in terms of just education, bringing a better product to the market, and improving the ecosystem. So, thank you very much, Kim.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again, Lauren.