Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands: “In 2010 when we partnered there were a lot of folks who said we were crazy. And maybe we were… I mean farmers and farmworkers coming together to ensure a fair and safe workplace. That’s nuts. Within a few months the evidence was clear that the program worked and the culture in our farms was changing for the better.”

Gerardo Reyes Chavez, CIW: “To protect workers and give the program’s human rights standards real teeth, the FPP harnessed buyers ’massive market power to reward growers who respected their workers’ rights and to stop buying from farms where workers were mistreated.”

As the Fair Food Program expands dramatically across the US and receives national and international attention as a blueprint for guaranteeing workers’ essential rights in a wide variety of industries, two FFP leaders gave a joint TED Talk — a rare “duet” in TED Talk parlance — on the groundbreaking partnership at the heart of the Program. Gerardo Reyes Chavez, a farmworker and senior staff member of the CIW, and Jon Esformes, CEO of Sunripe Certified Brands and the first major grower to join the FFP back in 2010, shared the TED stage in New York where they discussed what the FFP’s transformative power means to them and to the broader agricultural industry. As Esformes said during the talk: “From tomatoes to flowers to seafood we’ve created the basis for real and sustainable change.”

The two-day TED event featured a wide array of academics and industry experts discussing ways to mitigate the growing impacts of climate change and build a resilient, sustainable food system that includes protections for all those whose labor feeds the rest of the world in an age of rapidly rising temperatures. 

Chosen to deliver the event’s closing talk, Chavez and Esformes spoke to the audience of climate change experts and human rights advocates about the heat stress provisions of the Program — protections recently called “America’s strongest workplace heat rules” by The Washington Post — and the urgent need to expand the Presidential Medal-winning program as far and wide as possible. 

Check out their full TED Talk below, and stay tuned for more news on the Fair Food Program’s nationwide expansion!