Buying coffee with a conscience can be complicated these days. Sure, you can look for the fair trade certified sticker, awarded by TransFair USA, but a new company seems to come out with their own allegedly “better than fair trade” program every day.

Should you buy one of those coffees instead? Some of these “better than fair trade” programs are actually really hardcore, while others are simple greenwashing tactics — and most are somewhere in between. Deciphering between them, however, is a tough, time consuming job, even when it is actually achievable….

This is the reason that Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans, one of the first activist companies that pioneered fair trade coffee in the US, is going back to fair trade certification. Yes, I said going back, not simply joining. Dean’s Beans, along with Just Coffee and Larry’s Beans, left the fair trade roster back in 2004, alleging that the fair trade certification standards had gotten too watered down.

Of course, these three uber-fair trade companies kept walking the fair trade walk, even without the certification — always buying their coffee from fair trade certified co-op coffee farms (the farm needs to be fair trade certified by the FLO, AND the end product sold in the US certified by TransFair USA, in order to bear the fair trade certified logo). These companies even went so far as to put their financial contracts online to show the world that yes, indeed, their coffee farmers are getting a decent price for their beans.

But late last year, Dean’s Beans opted to go back, for 2 main reasons. The first: “More and more companies are coming up with their own version of fair trade, and not all of them are playing by the same rules,” Dean said. Some of these companies, Dean noted, buy coffee beans from fair trade farms, then call their coffee fair trade without bothering to pay TransFair to get the official fair trade certification logo. “There’s something inherently wrong with that,” Dean said, since if it weren’t for the certification system of which TransFair is a part, these fair trade farms couldn’t even reap the benefits of fair trade.

“How can you take advantage of that system and not pay for it?” Noting that one critique of fair trade is that farm inspections are not done frequently or throughly enough, Dean said, “we can’t have money to inspect farms if we’re not paying the fee.” By opting not to get the certification sticker from TransFair, these coffee companies are “helping drive the system down” via a sort of self-fulfilling critique.

Dean wanted Dean’s Beans to stand out from those kinds of companies. “My ability to have a clear message was starting to get lost,” Dean said. In contrast, the fair trade certification sticker conveys a clearer message with clearer standards; Dean called TransFair USA the “standard bearer” of how fair trade is understood in the US, for better or for worse.

The second reason had to do with the coffee farmers themselves. Dean sent out email to all the farmers who supply his coffee, asking them for their input on possibly rejoining the fair trade certification roster. The answer was an overwhelming yes.

“Universally, the farmers asked me to rejoin,” Dean said, “because they said they need strong voices that understand them inside TransFair to make TransFair an organization that understands farmers.”

TransFair’s reaction? Dean says the nonprofit sent out a delegation of 3 people to work with him, listening and talking over the issues that made Dean’s Beans and other coffee companies leave the roster. “I felt heard and understood and even felt empathy,” Dean says — something he didn’t get from TransFair before. “I think the organization has gotten a little more depth when it had when it was once basically just Paul [Rice, CEO of TransFair].

Dean’s plan, of course, is to push for changes at TransFair, especially now that he’s part of the certification roster again. More transparency and openness in TransFair is one of his biggest goals, his own suggestion being a formal roaster-licensee advisory board that allows for an open dialog.

Dean’s also still concerned about the watering down of fair trade certification standards, especially with some of the more recent “composite” products that use some fair trade ingredients but not others (Ben & Jerry’s fair trade certified ice creams, for example, might use fair trade chocolate but not fair trade sugar).

We’ll see what happens to fair trade standards. In the meantime, Dean actually hasn’t started using the fair trade certified loco he’s paid for! “It’s on the website,” he says, citing the difficulty of reprinting all the coffee packaging. His current plan’s to have display cards noting certification, instead of trying to hand-sticker every single pre-printed coffee bag with the logo.