540,000 participants at the swedish Fairtrade Challenge
2016-11-11
540,000 participants at the swedish Fairtrade Challenge
Did you know that the Swedish people love their fika break? A fika can include both a cup of hot beverage, preferably coffee and some kind of pastry to go with it. The average Swede drink about 10 kilograms’ coffee per person a year. But most importantly - the fika is a social event and an opportunity for a quality time.
Fairtrade Challenge has been running in Sweden for eight years in a row now and more than 540 000 swedes joined this year’s campaign. The fair fika breaks took place in over 11 000 different locations nationwide and it was a wide range of activities during the day. Some of the fair fika breaks took for example place in stores, day-cares, nursing homes, at schools and of course private in people’s homes.
- I think one of the main contributors for the successful campaign is our teamwork at Fairtrade Sweden says Julia Hedlin, one of the interns at Fairtrade Sweden and a former exchange student of Cardiff University who was working with the Swedish Fairtrade Challenge this year. The campaign is something that the entire office is involved with in very different, but equally important, ways. For example, she continues, our communication team has done a fantastic job putting together all sorts of material and greatly managed our social medias before and during the campaign (the hashtag #fairtradechallenge actually made it to the third place of Twitter Sweden’s trending list, which is pretty huge).
We’re also working closely with our Fairtrade Cities within Sweden and we do our very best to make 
them feel inspired to join the campaign and spread the word. However, this success would not have been possible without our big actors participating. There has been so many great initiatives from several chain stores, hotels and restaurants during the campaign and the people at Fairtrade Sweden working with these actors is of course to thank for a big part of this.
Once again, it is all about the teamwork. It gets us amazing campaigns, year after year, Julia finishes.
We really are looking forward to next years’ campaign, World Fairtrade Challenge, and we hope to bring even more people together for what we Swedes do best - having a nice fika break.
