Twin Trading
Twin Trading is a leading alternative trading company in the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1985 and is based in London.
Twin Trading is wholly owned by Twin, a registered charity and membership organisation, with 32 farmer co-operative members and 27 individual members.[1]
Twin's stated mission is “To increase fair and sustainable access to international markets for smallholder producers in the global south.” It seeks to achieve this by working with smallholder cooperatives to organise, develop infrastructure, gain certification to Fairtrade, organic standards and others, to improve the quality of their product and to overcome market barriers. Through its trading arm, Twin can create market access for the producer groups it works with, trading their products in European and US Fairtrade and speciality coffee markets.
Twin's work is largely in Africa and Latin America in the areas of coffee, nuts and cocoa. The organisation works with over 50 farmer organisations in 18 countries representing an estimated 400,000 smallholder farmers.[2]
Twin was originally founded in 1985 as the Third World Information Network with the support of the Greater London Council. In 1988 it began to import coffee, sold through Oxfam and Traidcraft, leading to the 1988 founding of Cafédirect by Twin with Oxfam, Traidcraft and Equal Exchange Trading. In 1993, Twin helped chocolate farmers in Ghana to found the Kuapa Kokoo co-operative, and in 1998 Divine Chocolate was formed, largely owned by Kuapa Kokoo, to market Fairtrade chocolate. Twin most recently launched Liberation Foods CIC in 2007, the UK's biggest importer of Fairtrade nuts. Liberation Foods is co-owned by the National Smallholder Farmers' Association of Malawi (NASFAM) and a number of other producer organisations in Africa and Latin America.
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