Harry Is Fairtrade Nuts
We live in the age of the celebrity endorsement, so much so that it is often impossible not to think about a certain footballer when shopping for our latest pair of pants, or a certain model when lathering our scalps with a particular brand of shampoo.
All this is, of course, well and good, but there are far fewer products actually devised and launched by celebrity folk, and even fewer still that are not intended to further boost the bank balances of these notable persons, but that are, instead, launched with purely altruistic intentions. There is the precedent of Paul Newman, whose personal recipe salad dressing is universally known, but now the Brit, one time doctor and BAFTA award winning comedian Harry Hill is following suit with his own brand of Fairtrade peanuts. Each pack is sure to cause a chuckle or two from the lucky purchaser – not only does the design feature Hill’s burnished bald head next to four peanuts, a comparison sure to draw a chortle from even the veteran snack enthusiast, but the products title, Harry’s Nuts, is playfully grammatically inexact; is the apostrophe designed to denote possession, informing the pub goer that this brand of nuts is owned by Hill, or, think on it if we dare, is the apostrophe present to denote the missing letter i, inferring that, in fact, Hill himself is Nuts (i.e. mad)?
The comedian is working in partnership with the brand Liberation! Nuts, a company founded through a partnership between Twin Trading and Equal Exchange, the people behind the Cafedirect coffee products. Liberation! Nuts are 42% owned by the farmers who produce the nuts, whilst the rest is made up of Fairtrade organisations. The company made £1.6 million in its first year of business, and Hill’s partnership will no doubt ensure that the company meets the expectation placed in it to double in size next year, thereby guaranteeing more money to the farmers who produce the nuts.
