We know that things are a little…austere around here. We also know that a lot of what we do is intended to reduce or remove packaging and replace it with reusable vessels. There’s a whole carbon foot print reducing argument behind this, but the simple truth is that we just don’t like waste.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t like packaging. Far from that, we actually really enjoy the richness and variety of coffee packaging in particular. Specialty coffee is full of both care and details. Roasters put a lot of effort and thought and intent into their work, and if they’re lucky (and acquainted with a talented creative professional) they have packaging that helps express that. Coffee is a complicated agricultural product, Specialty Coffee believes that everyone involved will benefit from valuing those complexities. Often it’s the job of coffee packaging to help move a large amount of information about those complixities from the roasters to the drinkers. It’s a challenging thing to do well, and we think it’s interest to see different people’s solutions, and even more exciting to see it done really well!
It’s also the case that coffee is business. It’s profit margins, and international trade, and farming investments, and overhead, and contract negotiations. Nothing good happen without the business ends of a lot of different players creating value and making money. Some of those players are the small businesses who buy and roast the coffee the that we’re delivering to our neighbors. They invest in their branding because, in addition to having something to express about themselves and their work, they are running businesses. They need their drinkers to know who they are and to know what they’re selling. They’re small local business and they reply on customers knowing who they are and what they do, and branding is a big part of how they do that.
Our biggest concern when making a decision to eliminate some form of packaging is that we will be stomping on the care and value that our partners have put into it and need to get from it. We want to promote coffee as the work of people for the pleasure of people. We want to know the people who roasted it. We want to see their personalities and humor and passion. We want to see their business so that we can find it and enjoy it again and again. We want see people, not anonymity. We want our drinkers/subscribers/customers to get to see these people and not just anonymous coffee beans.
Where does this leave us, your humble-ish local coffee subscription business runners , as we try to reduce waste while also promoting our local business partners? Not one place, and not with one single solution. We’re trying to stay flexible and adapt our products and processes. We’re keeping dialogs open with our partners to find and take any opportunity to make things better and happier and more beneficial for all of us. It’s a little ill-defined and a little uncertain, but that’s what makes this exciting for us.
But we still hate waste and we still love packing. As a small gesture to our selves, and to others who might feel sympathetic with our dilemma, we post a running visual record of coffee packing on our Instagram. We have a collection of coffee packing from the last 10+ years that shows up there mixed in with a lot of the packaging from our roaster partners. We’re design nerds, so we like this sort of thing. Check it out and let us know what you think!