Who Is Trade Aid? The Christchurch Importer Behind New Zealand's Organic Coffee

In 1972 a Christchurch couple hung $1,000 worth of Tibetan carpets in a city gallery, and by Trade Aid's own history, within 15 minutes of opening, every one had sold. The couple were Vi and Richard Cottrell, and the carpets became Trade Aid.

Most of us know the rest of the story from the outside: the shop with the baskets and the jute bags, the chocolate by the till, possibly your mum's favourite place to buy a present for someone she didn't know very well. The shops are gone now, and so is the chocolate factory. What's left is the part most people never saw, and it may well be in your cup this morning.

How it started

The Cottrells were a teacher and a lawyer in their early 30s, according to a Trade Aid training booklet, when they answered an advertisement for an adviser to a Tibetan refugee resettlement scheme in northern India. In Trade Aid's own telling, Richard gave legal support to refugees while Vi looked for overseas buyers for their carpets. They came home two years later still wanting to help, ordered the carpets, and you know how that went.

The history records that in 1973 a meeting of interested members agreed to set up "an import company to trade with underdeveloped countries". Its first product was strips of handwoven Tibetan cloth, sewn into bags in Christchurch and sold at Beaths department store, and by Trade Aid's timeline the first shop opened in Christchurch in 1974.

Wellington remembers it a little differently. Commonsense Organics says its co-founders Jim and Marion Kebbell started the first Trade Aid shop in Wellington in 1973, in a hard-to-find room on the second floor of a house on Willis Street, and by the family's own account their main retail talent at the time was keeping customers out. The same tribute says Jim Kebbell went on to chair BioGro for many years, opened the first Commonsense store in 1991, and died in January 2026 aged 87. It turns out to be a short walk from a Trade Aid shop to the organic movement.

A campaign that happened to sell things

Trade Aid's own history reads as much like a campaign as a business. In 1980 Sir Edmund Hillary fronted a national appeal to raise trading capital for it, and the following year its annual conference voted to oppose the Springbok tour.

The food came alongside the politics. Tea arrived first, in 1976, and the Sustainable Business Network says that shipment came from Sri Lankan fair trade producers. Coffee followed in 1985, by Trade Aid's account, when the first beans arrived from Nicaragua with a campaign fronted by Eva Rickard.

The campaigning never really stopped. In 2007 Trade Aid presented Parliament with 17,000 signatures asking for a ban on slave-made goods, collected on paper in three weeks, and in February 2026 it welcomed the cross-party Modern Slavery Bill lodged by National MP Greg Fleming and Labour MP Camilla Belich. Vi Cottrell was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to Trade Aid and the fair trade movement, on top of the Queen's Service Medal she received in 1994.

How it was run

Trade Aid likes to say that no one owns Trade Aid, or maybe everyone does. The legal answer is tidier: the Charities Register describes the group as an incorporated society which owns a company which owns another company. The training booklet fills in the rest. The first company is Trade Aid Importers Limited, which buys, imports and wholesales, and is 100% owned by the society, Trade Aid New Zealand Incorporated. The second was Sweet Justice Limited, the chocolate maker, wholly owned by Trade Aid Importers.

The shops were something else again. Each was owned by its own local charitable trust, which held the lease, employed the staff and bought its stock from Christchurch under a "Shop Contract". Here's the clever bit: those shop trusts were members of the society, and filled six of the ten seats on the executive that appoints the importer's board. So the importer supplied the shops, the shops ran the society, and the society owned the importer, an arrangement the booklet calls a "circular connected structure".

It wasn't a co-operative. Every part was a registered charity, so nobody held shares and nobody took a dividend. The society also owns the Trade Aid brand and the building, warehouse and land at 174 Gayhurst Road in Dallington, where Trade Aid's history says it has been since 1994.

The money

Being a charity says nothing about where the money comes from, and Trade Aid earns its money by selling things. In the year to June 2017, the last year with a published breakdown, 99.7% of revenue came from trading and just 0.3% from donations. By Trade Aid's own count, sales passed $1 million in 1989, $10 million in 2012 and $20 million in 2019.

More recently it has been losing money. The group's returns on the Charities Register show spending ahead of income in each of the three years to June 2025, by about $2.6 million in total. The worst were the two years to June 2024, each about $1.2 million in the red, and by June 2025 the gap had narrowed to about $124,000. Which brings us to the shops.

The shops close

In 2017 Trade Aid had 31 shops, and by 2023, its history says, there were 24. In March 2024 Trade Aid announced it would progressively close them, saying the cost-of-living crisis had brought rising costs and falling sales. Chief executive Paul Davenport told the Wairarapa Times-Age that the 24 stores were "not a sustainable model moving forward".

The shops employed 96 people, most of them part-time or casual, but the real workforce was volunteers. In 2023 Trade Aid counted 354 of them across the organisation. The Times-Age reported that Masterton ran on one full-timer, two casuals and 20 volunteers, while in Picton every volunteer was a woman in her 60s, 70s or 80s.

Thirteen stores closed in late June 2024, among them Oamaru, which had been open for 30 years. The same closure list shows the last two to go were Christchurch, on 5 January, and Kapiti, on 9 February, which by the calendar puts the end of Trade Aid retail in early 2025.

The chocolate went too. Nelson's store manager said the Sweet Justice factory in Christchurch closed in July, with the price of cocoa a factor. Trade Aid had opened that factory in Sydenham in 2014. Its cocoa came from the Dominican Republic and Peru, and in July 2024 Trade Aid said the price had hit nearly US$12,000 a tonne earlier that year, around four times the year before.

Not everything local went with the shops. Many of the shop trusts are still on the Charities Register, and Picton's says it will carry on its fair trade work without a shop.

What it imports now

The shop window hid the real business, and Trade Aid said as much in its March 2024 announcement: most people think of baskets, rugs and bags, but it had become an importer and wholesaler selling to supermarkets and well-known brands.

Its "Our story" page lists coffee, tea, drinking chocolate, sugar, rice, spices, cocoa and soap in the online shop, and the Sustainable Business Network adds coconut milk and dried fruit to the food list. As of December 2020, Trade Aid said all of its tea was certified organic. The "Our story" page also says it now sources from 26 trading partner organisations across Africa, Asia and Latin America. Its history counted 59 in 2023, before the shops closed.

But the big one is coffee.

The coffee

The "Our story" page says local roasters started buying Trade Aid's green fair trade beans by the sack in 2003. Green coffee is the raw, unroasted bean, which roasters turn into what you buy. By 2008, according to its history, Trade Aid was importing more than 700 tonnes of green beans a year, and in June 2021 Lyttelton Port reported it expected about seventy 20-foot containers, more than 1,300 tonnes of coffee, that year. The same article said it imports green beans for more than 80 roasters nationwide, and that all of Trade Aid's coffee is certified organic.

That last line is the one that matters here. If a New Zealand roaster sells organic fair trade coffee, there's a decent chance the beans came off a ship at Lyttelton and through a warehouse in Dallington. Trade Aid calls itself New Zealand's largest importer of fair trade coffee, and the Sustainable Business Network went further in 2023, saying its partnerships remain responsible for most of the country's fair trade and organic coffee supply.

The beans come from co-operatives. In 2021 the port's article listed Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico and Honduras, while Trade Aid's roaster page now says nine countries.

Ethiopia is the backbone. Trade Aid's Justin Purser wrote in 2023 that it had contracted more than 360 containerloads, over 6,000 tonnes, of Ethiopian coffee since 2005. He also wrote that at one point Trade Aid accounted for 90% of all New Zealand imports from Ethiopia, and that nearly a third of every sack it has ever imported came from there. Its first Ethiopian partner, he noted, was the Oromia co-operative union, run by Tadesse Meskela, the man at the centre of the documentary Black Gold.

In 2023, for the first time in 18 years, Trade Aid couldn't buy Harar, one of its two original Ethiopian coffees. Trade Aid's Ewan Cameron explained that Harar farmers have been cutting out coffee to plant khat, a leaf chewed as a stimulant that needs less water and less labour, and pays more per kilo. Hard to argue with the farmers on that one.

The instant coffee has its own story. It comes from the Kagera Co-operative Union in north-west Tanzania, whose farmers own the factory that turns their beans into instant. Trade Aid's own Impact blend, meanwhile, is roasted and packed every week in Christchurch.

Whose bags it ends up in

Trade Aid doesn't publish a list of its roasters, but a few say so themselves. L'affare says it partners with Trade Aid, and in 2017 became one of the first roasters to use the World Fair Trade Organization's label on retail packs through that relationship. Hummingbird, which started life as Christchurch's Garden City Coffee, says in 2004 it was one of the first to directly import fair trade organic green beans in partnership with Trade Aid.

Hummingbird is no longer local. Bell Tea & Coffee bought it in 2016, and Bell, by then renamed BrewGroup, was taken over by Jacobs Douwe Egberts later that year. In January 2026 the government consented to a company ultimately owned by Keurig Dr Pepper buying JDE Peet's, including its New Zealand subsidiary, and the takeover settled on 1 April 2026.

So a fair trade relationship that began with a Christchurch couple's carpet sale now feeds, among others, a brand owned by the people who make Dr Pepper. Trade Aid sells to anyone who buys on its terms. That was always the point.

Fair trade, the Trade Aid way

Trade Aid's training booklet explains that its fair trade guarantee comes from the World Fair Trade Organization's Guarantee System, which checks the whole organisation, buyers included, against ten principles of fair trade. Its argument is that product labels put most of the standards on producers and very few on the traders further along the chain. Organic is a separate check, done by a separate certifier, on the beans themselves.

Where that leaves it

As of March 2025, Trade Aid said it was paying more for coffee and passing some of the cost on to roasters, and therefore to cafés and to you.

The baskets are mostly gone and so is the chocolate, while the tea, sugar and cocoa have moved online. The coffee is everywhere. You just can't see the shop anymore.

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