Students who join us for Roasting 101 or meet up with us at Coffee Fest events across the country have many questions about starting their own coffee company. We're always happy to chat about machine selection, space planning, and sourcing great coffee.
But one of the topics that people often overlook is something that will have a huge impact on how much coffee they actually sell: what their retail coffee bag looks like.
Of the many choices you have to make when you start a roasting company, one choice that falls into the “seems simple but is surprisingly complicated” category is your coffee bag and label design. There’s information that’s required to be on that label, there’s information that’s nice to include, and there’s plenty of information that doesn’t belong. Your customers are looking for specific details on your coffee label to help inform their purchasing decisions. How can you know your bases are covered?
We've seen thousands of coffee bags, some more successful than others, and we've learned a lot about the best way to package great coffee.
In this short series, we'll share some of the advice we give folks about their coffee bag and label design.
Bag Selection
If you’ve shopped around for coffee bags before, you know there are a lot of options and the order minimums are usually in the thousands. If you’re buying in bulk, you want to make sure you like what you’ve selected and that it will work for you for the foreseeable future.
As your company grows, you’ll have a bigger budget for premium, digitally printed bags with highly stylized designs. But when you’re just starting, the most straightforward option is to choose a versatile bag and go all-in on your label design. Labels are cheaper to customize, print, and much easier to change as your coffees and brand identities evolve.
Shape and Style
The bag itself should be able to stand up and look nice on a retail shelf. Pouch-style and gusseted bags are good. Square-bottom (sometimes called block-bottom or flat-bottom) bags are even better. We always recommend a one-way off-gassing valve to keep your coffee fresh and allow it to release gas after roasting. Bags with zipper closures that are resealable feel more premium than tin-tie options.
The bags we use for classes, events, retail, and roasted coffee samples are all from Roastar. They have a ton of options for bag styles and allow you to customize your bag and create digital mock-ups using their online design tool. They didn't sponsor this blog post, we just like them a lot.
Your bag style and size are the first impression your customers will have about your brand. Make sure to select a bag that suits the amount of coffee you’re selling, don’t sell 250g in a 16oz bag and leave a bunch of empty space, making customers feel like they're not getting what they paid for. If you do choose a less expensive option like a tin-tie closure, make sure to keep it neat and squared when closing it and tuck the ends of the tie under the flap of the bag. Finally, think about how your coffee will ship and how the bag will compress or wrinkle in a box or mailer.
Boxing and Shipping
Steve Green, owner of Mill City Roasters, wants every package that ships from us to “feel like a gift” when the customer opens it. We have over a dozen box sizes in our warehouse so that anything a customer orders from a single roaster thermocouple to a large cleaning whip comes in a box that’s just the right size, packed tight with Kraft paper, and sealed with branded packing tape.
When you source your bags, remember to also shop for a few box sizes that will fit orders of one, two, or more bags of coffee. Consider what else will go inside the box to help reinforce your brand identity. Things like small postcards, stickers, or short thank-you notes are delightful surprises for customers to unbox.
Think about how the box will be treated in transit, and pack accordingly. It's a good idea to use some nice packing paper or leave very little space in the box, so that if the package has a bumpy journey your coffee bag still looks nice. We also recommend avoiding white boxes for the same reason: they may arrive looking pretty rough.
What’s Required
The Federal Department of Agriculture provides guidelines for what you must include on your coffee labels. We are constantly surprised to see retail coffee out in the wild that are missing some of this required information. These details help protect consumers and offer traceability on every product sold for consumption.
The first requirement that’s missed frequently is perhaps the most obvious: what’s in the bag. The words “whole bean coffee”, “specialty coffee”, or “Arabica Coffee” all satisfy this requirement, but many roasters use the country name instead. Do both! Call the coffee “coffee” somewhere on your label and include the origin country somewhere bigger.
Net weight is also required and can be listed in either grams or ounces. Since we get this question fairly frequently, we’ll address it here as well: 12oz is a standard retail coffee bag size these days. Some companies continue to offer a full pound, but with the increased cost of green coffee, a 16oz bag would need to be fairly expensive to maintain a good margin. Other sizes, like 10oz or 8oz, are typical for higher-end green coffees like rare varietals or exclusive auction lots.
Lastly, the label needs to include your company’s physical address. This should be an address of where the coffee was roasted, packaged, or distributed from. For the coffee that we sell, we use our roastery’s address, which is also the address for our main office. Many companies forego this information by including their website, but that doesn’t technically meet the requirement.
Click here to read Part Two in this series and learn what customers look for on your label, and what you can leave off.
Comment
Thanks for addressing this subject. This is very useful information that every coffee roaster has to address at some point. Hopefully sooner than later.