The story
Equal Exchange was founded in 1986 by Rink Dickinson, Jonathan Rosenthal, and Michael Rozyne. Before founding Equal Exchange, Dickinson, Rosenthal, and Rozyne were managers at a food cooperative in New England, and were actively involved in American food industry reform.
For three years prior to Equal Exchange's birth, the three founders met once weekly to discuss how global food trade could be changed to increase incomes and stabilize economic situations of farmers. The meetings resulted in the development of an alternative trade model that utilized direct trade, established long-term contracts, and offered higher-than-market prices to small coffee farmers. This differs from the traditional trade model, in which buyers go through a series of middlemen to purchase coffee beans from plantation farmers.
From Wikipedia’s article on Equal Exchange, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5