Do you like dried fruit and nuts? We eat them a lot here and they make excellent, healthy snacks and lunch box fillers, as well as making super baking ingredients. One of our favourite suppliers, Tropical Wholefoods, supply us with a huge variety – apricots and walnuts from Pakistan, sun dried bananas and pineapples from Uganda, and mangoes and cashews from Burkina Faso. Check out some of our range on our Click & Collect shop here.

Tropical Wholefoods was started in Uganda in the early 1990s by Kate Sebag and Adam Brett, who were both working in Uganda at the time and who wanted to help Ugandan farmers sell their delicious fruit at good prices in Europe.  They decided that solar fruit drying would be a good solution to getting all this amazing fruit to the European market – it is an affordable technology, uses only renewable energy (the sun),  adds value, extends shelf life, and makes fruits more transportable, retaining waste at the point where it is grown.  Fruits are sun dried when fresh and fully ripe so capturing flavour – and no preservatives or sugars are added. They set up a network of farmer suppliers and before they knew it, they were importing their first sun dried bananas and pineapples from Uganda.

They soon added partner Gebana Afrique in Burkina Faso which supplied dried mangoes and cashews.  Apricots, almonds and walnuts were to come next from Mountain Fruits in Pakistan.

For Tropical Wholefoods, Fairtrade means more than just buying fruit at Fairtrade prices. They also give technical advice to all their suppliers; from helping with factory management and design, to advising on organic and Fairtrade certification, or on best agricultural practice. Many of their Fairtrade farmer partners in Africa and Asia have benefitted from visiting the Tropical Wholefoods factory in Sunderland for in-house training and help with getting development funding to grow and improve their businesses.

And the positive impact doesn’t stop there. As just one example, Fairtrade premiums, (an extra sum of money paid on top of the selling price that farmers or workers invest in projects of their choice) paid to Tropical Wholefood’s Pakistani supplier have been spent by the Farmers Association on books for community schools, a new playground, water tanks, a generator, sewing machines, school fees for the poorest students and irrigation upgrades.