Where you spend your money matters. That belief is central to Fair Trade USA™'s mission of building a world where farmers, fishers, and workers receive a fair price for their efforts. The nonprofit’s certification program designs social, economic, and environmental standards that ensure fair wages, safe working conditions, and environmental protection, helping create lasting change across global supply chains.
To deliver on this mission, Fair Trade USA relies on sophisticated technology to collect, analyze, and share impact data with thousands of partners worldwide. "Our partner portal is where traders and producers report transactions, premium usage, and compliance information," says Nichol Weisbecker, Associate Product Manager at Fair Trade USA. "That data is critical for measuring impact, improving the program, and telling authentic stories about change."
However, managing this sensitive information across producers, traders, brands, and internal staff requires robust identity security that ensures only the right people can access the right data at the right time. As Fair Trade USA evolved their AWS-based technology stack and expanded into AI-powered impact reporting, they needed an identity solution that could scale across 3,600 partners and 140 internal staff while providing enterprise-grade security.
"Data security doesn't really work without identity security," says Spencer Shadel, Technical Lead at Fair Trade USA. "Any breach in the front end of those tools means a breach into our data." Through Okta for Good, Fair Trade USA found a unified identity security fabric that made enterprise-grade security financially feasible for a mission-driven organization.
Unifying identity across a complex AWS ecosystem
Fair Trade USA's custom-built platforms run primarily on AWS, with data flowing through their data warehouse to their partner portal, compliance software, and business intelligence tools. Before implementing unified identity with Okta, managing access was fragmented and manual. "We spent a lot of time compiling various spreadsheets and filtering them down," Shadel explains. "Communications were disjointed, and we didn't have insight into user activity."
The team implemented Okta Customer Identity and Okta Workforce Identity as the authentication and authorization layer for partners and staff logging into these AWS-based tools. Okta integrates with AWS API Gateway for token management, while AWS Redshift, Glue, and S3 handle data storage and processing. This architecture allows Fair Trade USA to maintain a single source of truth for identity while leveraging AWS's data capabilities.
"The interoperability of Okta made it really easy to embed into our entire tech ecosystem," Shadel says. Where teams previously had to manually filter data for each partner request, Okta’s robust APIs and documentation empower them to deliver information in real time based on authenticated identity. “With Okta, we can identify who the user is and what organization they're with, and serve up data about their suppliers immediately," Shadel explains. "It’s a far more efficient process.”
Securing partner experiences with Okta Customer Identity
At the heart of Fair Trade USA’s tech stack is their partner portal. Embedded within the portal is Insights Hub, a real-time data visualization platform that shows brands their fair trade supply chains, including ingredients, volumes, and premiums generated. The sensitivity of this information — which includes trade secrets and competitive data — requires precise access controls. Okta Customer Identity provides authentication and authorization with granular token-based permissions to ensure partners see only their own data. "That authorization piece sometimes gets overlooked, but that’s how we make sure we’re tailoring the experience the right way to the right users," Shadel says.
The team also uses Universal Directory to further personalize experiences based on partner attributes. For instance, primary language settings that are stored in Okta automatically translate portal content and email communications, so Spanish-speaking producers only see content in Spanish without manual intervention.
Similarly, Okta offers customizable authentication factors that allow Fair Trade USA to meet partners where they are. With such a broad base of users, using differing technology, this flexibility is crucial to minimizing friction for all. The team is exploring Okta FastPass for passwordless authentication to further reduce sign-in friction.
These seamless experiences are critical for partners who must interact with Fair Trade USA’s systems to maintain their fair trade status. "Okta helps us remove any hurdles in accessing our systems," Weisbecker says. "If partners have trouble logging in, they may not have the motivation to do it again." In a competitive space where other certification bodies offer similar services, reducing friction directly supports partner retention and data collection quality.
Increasing efficiency with automated provisioning
As Fair Trade USA expanded their technology offerings, internal staff needed access to the same platforms that external partners use. Rather than managing users in two separate systems, the team implemented Okta Org2Org to bridge their Okta Workforce Identity and Customer Identity tenants, giving everyone Single Sign-On (SSO) access to the applications they need.
Working with Okta for Good's Pro Bono Professional Services team, Fair Trade USA used a hub-and-spoke configuration via Okta Org2Org. This enabled their internal Workforce Identity users to be automatically provisioned into the Customer Identity tenant with authentication routed back through their corporate directory. "Users don’t notice any difference in the interface," Shadel says. "We just add them to the right group and they automatically get access to the application."
This implementation reduced application provisioning time to approximately one-third of previous levels. Likewise, configuring SSO for new applications now takes 15-20 minutes instead of hours, onboarding new users will eventually take seconds, and offboarding will happen automatically. These efficiency gains free the IT team to focus on strategic initiatives. "The more we can eliminate simple, repetitive tasks, the more we can work on innovative projects," Shadel says. "That time goes directly back to delivering value to our partners."
Securing AI-powered impact with identity governance
Looking ahead, Fair Trade USA is launching “Stories of Impact,” an AI-powered initiative using Amazon Bedrock to analyze narratives submitted by producers of fair trade products. The system applies metadata tags, generates summaries, and scores engagement to surface compelling impact stories, transforming a historically manual, time-intensive process into an automated workflow.
Okta plays a critical role in securing this AI workload. By managing authentication for both the partner portal, where stories are submitted, and the internal systems where AI analysis occurs, Okta ensures only authorized users can access and interact with AI capabilities while maintaining full audit trails.
As AI workflows become more prevalent, Fair Trade USA is working to establish governance frameworks for non-human identities. "As we explore how agentic tools will fit into our organization, we'll need to centralize visibility and governance of these solutions,” Shadel says. “Okta will definitely be involved in that discussion."
With Okta bringing their unified identity security fabric to life, Fair Trade USA can focus on ensuring that every purchase creates lasting change in communities around the world. "Okta is flexible where it counts, simple where it needs to be, and secure all the way through,” Shadel says. “Our partners put their trust in us to keep both their data and their identities secure. Because we can trust Okta, our partners can trust us."
About Customer
Fair Trade USA is building an innovative model of responsible business, conscious consumerism, and shared value to eliminate poverty and enable sustainable development for farmers, workers, their families, and their communities around the world.
