Ethical sourcing is the procurement practice built on fair trade principles — buying ingredients in ways that respect producers, workers, animals, and the environment. It means paying prices that sustain farming livelihoods, refusing child and forced labour, requiring decent working conditions down the supply chain, and choosing production methods that protect ecosystems and animal welfare. Certification schemes — Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance, RSPO — provide the audited assurance, while companies’ own codes extend the standards to uncertified supply. The practice responds to a simple observation: the cheapest ingredient often carries hidden costs paid by someone else — the underpaid farmer, the cleared forest, the caged hen. Ethical sourcing internalises those costs, accepting higher prices as the honest price of production. It turns the supply chain from a cost to be cut into a responsibility to be managed.