I thought i'd update to say i have a meeting with the Director of Development and Operations on Wednesday to talk about switching to Fairtrade certified products. I have also been invited to speak at the employee representatives meeting in April, and i have already gained the support of several colleagues here.

LOL, i feel i should have the BBC following me around, filming my progress! ;)

I have made a presentation in which i embedded two videos. I used keepvid.com to get the .flv from youtube, then Riva FLV Encoder to turn it into .mpeg, and embedded it straight into the Powerpoint so that it plays on-click! :) Marvellous!

The two videos i have used are these:
Fairtrade at work
Fairtrade Dominican Republic

I am trying to put together a proposition for the company i work for to switch to fairtrade tea and coffee, fruit and juice. I am hoping to arrange a meeting, including accounts and marketing departments. I will show that it is a better deal for farmers and workers in developing countries, it will be good for our employees to raise morale and feel we are making a positive difference, and it will be good to say on our website that we are a fairtrade company.

I am also hoping to arrange a coffee morning for our employees to sample fairtrade products and learn more about it.

Exciting, much?! :)

I was absolutely delighted today to discover there is a Co-op in Woking! For a while i have been getting my dark chocolate from Alldays, which sold Co-op chocolate until it went and turned into a Budgens, which sells no fairtrade chocolate whatsoever. But a quick look on the website turned up a Co-op just 15 minutes walk from my office, on a road i had never been to before. And they sell these:

YAY!! The dark chocolate is my very favourite chocolate in the whole entire world! For the taste, the texture, even the size of the chunks – not too big like Bournville – just absolutely perfect!

I really got into this when i decided to give up milk chocolate for Lent this year. I knew i couldn't give up chocolate altogether (chocolate is my middle name!!) but i limited myself to dark chocolate. I also discovered that it was much more economical to buy a bar of this for 99p which would last me for a week, rather than buy a 50p chocolate bar every day. Now i very rarely eat milk chocolate anymore – i much prefer dark!

Yum yum yum yum yum yum!!!!! :D