Every time we announce a company making a major commitment to Fairtrade (Ferrero being the most recent), we get great feedback from the public, other companies, and NGOs. Yet nothing prepared me for the excitement last year when Nespresso announced a commitment to source 10 percent of their coffee on Fairtrade terms and to work with the Colombian government on a pension plan for small farmers in Colombia.
People were tweeting the launch photos, asking me all about it. Were they excited to see a quality leader like Nespresso joining Fairtrade? The new, innovative Farmers' Futures Programme? The link with Colombia? Or could it just possibly, perhaps, maybe have something to do with the involvement of a certain Mr. George Clooney?
The film star is Nespresso's brand ambassador - using the money he earns to do things like put a satellite over Darfur to monitor troop movements. He is also genuinely interested in the story of coffee farmers, and intrigued by Nespresso's plan to work with Fairtrade farmers on pensions.
Being somewhat slower than others I wasn't the first to join the Clooney fan club. But he won my heart when in 2007, upon receiving the Nobel Laureate's Summit Peace Award for his work in Darfur, Clooney said he felt that he was coming before the Laureates "a failure."
"We do concerts, rallies, where thousands of people show up and say how terrible it is," Clooney told a news conference at the time. "But the truth is not one single thing has changed. Now it's time to turn that corner."
Sometimes that's how it feels in Fairtrade - you can be blown away by all that Fairtrade has achieved in the past 25 years - the fact that public recognition of the FAIRTRADE Mark is 90% in four countries; that sales in 2012 topped €4.8 billion; that we are now working with over 1.4 million producers across 70 countries....
And yet and yet and yet, we can only ever be constructively dissatisfied because the scale of the task remains so great. Millions of farmers are lining up to join Fairtrade, but they can only sell as much on fairer terms as the companies and the public buy.
So while we have notched up some great successes - for example about half of all bananas in Switzerland are Fairtrade, a fifth of roses in Germany, all the sugar from Belize - for most commodities, Fairtrade is still less than 1 percent of global trade. That is why we have to step up the pace and unlock the power of the many farmers, workers and citizens to make trade fairer. We have to innovate and continue to push the model forward as the world changes.
Two weeks ago, I was in Colombia to meet the phenomenally well-organised coffee farmers of Aguadas Cooperative who sell to, among others, Nespresso. As with most farming groups the world over, the majority are men - but roughly a third of the members are women.