University of Vaasa - Vaasan yliopisto

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2007, Zotter moved to its new factory in Bergl. Currently the Zotter Company
has 100 employees; most of them are local women of Bergl.
Zotter Company is one of a kind. Zotter is one of the few chocolate producers
in Europe, to start the production with cacao beans, and proud to claim that
they are the only company processing organic (bio) and fair trade cacao in
Europe as well. Every year Zotter Factory processes 450 tons of cocoa from
different countries like; Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Costa
Rica, Panama, Peru and Brazil. Other suppliers are Paraguay (sugar) and
Tyrol-Austria (milk), which are also organic. Zotter is a contracting partner of
Fairtrade since 2004. The company explains to its consumers that the fair
trade initiation is necessary, with the statement; “as cocoa processing
company we carry the responsibility for the living and working conditions of
the cocoa farmers in Third World countries“ (http://www.zotter.at). They are
not just explaining about their aim, but also give information about their
projects in Latin America and about fair trade concept itself.
Zotter is not just famous with their fair trade and bio (organic) chocolates. In
a country such as Austria, Zotter has a justified reputation about their design
and innovativeness (Glitzner, 2007). Andreas H. Gratze is Josef Zotter’s
partner from the foundation, and he was specialized about the designs, and
packaging, receiving several design rewards. Innovative products are also one
of the strongest parts of Zotter, but one of the distinguished specialties is to
inform consumers about the origin of the cacao used in the product. Products
such as coffee, origin is very important but it is not a very common
informative action when it comes to chocolate industry (Toler, 2006). By
informing consumers about the origin, the company adds a differentiated
identity to the product.
With chocolate theater in the factory, and factory tours, Zotter not only shows
its production conditions, which has been awarded as sustainable, but it also
gets a chance to show the value creation for Third World countries that it is
supplied from. Probably, these are the reasons why Zotter was the first name
recalled in Graz when the words fair trade were spelled.
On the last step, an internet based questionnaire was conducted. When the
questionnaire results are examined, it is seen that, there were 407 respondents from
Austria and 203 from Turkey (572 to 407 (71%) and 461 to 203 (44%)). Even the
populations of the two countries are not easily represented by these samples, to be
able to compare the sample in such statistical analyses; random 203 respondents
were chosen among Austrians. Perception scale results of random 203 and 407
Austrian respondents were compared by t-test, to make sure these random 203 are
not significantly different from the sample of 407.