Standards & schemes
Ecocert (scheme owner)
In brief
Fair for Life is a fair-trade and responsible supply-chain certification owned and operated by Ecocert, applied across food, cosmetics and textiles. It certifies both producer operations and the brands buying from them — a distinguishing feature, since it assesses the trading relationship itself, including pricing, long-term commitment and labour conditions along the chain, rather than the farm alone. Scoring is threshold-based against a published standard covering social, fair-trade and environmental criteria, and certified products may carry the Fair for Life label where certified content rules are met; the chain of custody is segregated. Because Ecocert is a certification body as well as scheme owner, the scheme sits between classic fair-trade labels (Fairtrade) and social-audit programmes: it produces a certifiable claim with on-product labelling potential. Certification covers operations from production through trade, so both a farming cooperative and the brand selling its product can hold certificates in the same chain. Certified operations are scored and published through Ecocert's systems, and the label appears on products in European and North American natural-products channels. Certification supports a claim only within the certified scope and chain-of-custody model; it does not by itself prove outcomes or validate wording beyond that scope.
Conditional relationships
A relationship does not mean that the standard proves or validates every use of a claim.
Recognition & legal context
No reviewed law references are published.
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