Fair trade and an honest price have produced a business model for a Phoenixville entrepreneur that is as sweet as his products.

Bill Wiedmann’s Singing Dog Vanilla cultivates quality vanilla farmers in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea in order to deliver top-notch vanilla “beans, extract, coffee, tea, sugar, salt, bean paste, and lip balm,” according to a Reading Eagle profile by Courtney H. Diener-Stokes.

“We are looking for the kind of customer who appreciates both quality and service, and is OK paying for that,” Wiedmann said. “We have never positioned ourselves as being the cheapest one out there. That is not what we are about.

“We practice fair trade, so we can foster relationships with these farmers, so they can continue to grow vanilla for years, and grow profitably. On the customer side, they are happy with what they are getting and essentially get what they pay for: great quality and service at a fair price.”

After starting the business in Hawaii in 2004, Wiedmann and co-founder Marty Parisien now run Singing Dog Vanilla from opposite sides of the country.

“I moved back to the area, where I’m from originally, after our kids approached school age in 2007,” Wiedmann said. “I’m more on the operational side of things.

“What has really worked out well is he wanted to live on the West Coast and me on the East, and that fits with our model, where we sell direct in terms of distribution. A nice percentage of our customers are within one-day shipping, if not two.”

Read more about Singing Dog Vanilla in the Reading Eagle here.