Green Mountain Fair Trade Coffee

BzzAgent sure knows how to treat a mom right. Free coffee samples? Yes please! Tell everyone how awesome Green Mountain Coffee is? Sure thing. Let people know about Fair Trade? Ummmm. Huh?

This campaign is for Green Mountain Coffee. I had heard of them, but never tried them before and was excited to try it out. This campaign is also about Fair Trade which I had heard of but never really looked into. When I think "Fair Trade" I think hippies and granola and greenies and not me. So I decided to do some research (while drinking my free coffee samples, of course. More on that later).

So Fair Trade is pretty basic: Make sure the workers are paid a "fair" price for their products to help their sustainability. So no buying things from sweatshops in China and stuff. It helps producers in developing countries have better trading conditions. This is pretty awesome. This also means it's pretty pricey. I wish I could give you a cost for a bag of Green Mountain coffee, but SMP only had "k-cups" and alas, I'm still without a Keurig. I don't shop much anywhere else, so not sure where else in the valley you could find some. I love the idea, but for a family of 5 on a tight budget, I'm not sure if I could justify paying more for coffee. We're not really coffee snobs per say, we just like name brand stuff that's on sale (think Folgers, Maxwell House, Yuban usually). But..... there are some way awesome things about the Fair Trade movement and it's affect on coffee. In order to be qualified as Fair Trade coffee, the commodities must stick to strict sustainable agro-ecological practices, which in English means less chemical fertilization, ways to protect the forests and ways to prevent erosion. That's pretty cool. So not just anyone can claim to be "Fair Trade" because they have decent wages. Also, this means that FT coffee is more often than not organic.

So let's talk Green Mountain Fair trade. You MUST check them out. Here's a link to their Facebook page so start there. Then check out this video of Grace Porter. Love her name (ok so I'm biased) and the video is pretty interesting too. Helps you learn more about Fair Trade. And her music is pretty awesome too. There's also this video of Michael Franti. And on November 13th Green Mountain is going to replay his concert on thier FB page so tune in!!

Ok let's talk coffee.

I'm not going to lie, we drank this coffee up fast. So fast in fact that I didn't get a chance to get some pics. And I gave Mike's dad a sample pack to take home and try. I was going to buy some more but like I said before, Smith's only had k-cups. Then I happened to get another free sample in the mail! I forgot that I signed up for one a few weeks ago. Win! So time for a photo-op.

Mercy was smelling it. She's like her mom and likes to smell coffee :)

And apparently she thinks she can read. Checking out the back and all about the Fair Trade and Organic-ness of it.

So I brewed a pot (aka 8 cups). DELICIOUS. I'm not a coffee snob, but this is some good coffee. I had tried it before and didn't really notice a difference from what we usually buy, but this time I put less sugar and cream in it so I could really taste the coffee. 

My favorite coffee cup. Gotta love the floating head so you know how full to fill the cup. 

Mercy needed another smell. She wanted to sip it and if I thought she wouldn't like it, I'd let her. However, all my luck I'll have a 2 year old addicted to coffee and I don't need that!

Anyway, the coffee is great, but probably pricey so who knows if we'll buy it and like I said before....only k-cups. Man, I need a Keurig. BzzAgent should have a campaign for those :)

#GotItFree

I get free samples to try and share because I'm a BzzAgent.