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Coffee
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Everything Else
We're really excited about our new coffee boxes! If you buy our beans from a deli, coffee shop, or from our own coffee shop at Cutlery Works, you'll notice that the packaging is now looking a bit different.
It's been a really fun process and has kept us pretty busy during lockdown. We teamed up with a really talented illustrator called Graeme (check out his work here) and came up with this idea for a fun design.
We had two main aims for the project. Most important was to make the packaging better for the environment (more on that in a sec) - but we also wanted to make the whole thing more fun, with lots of bright colours. We wanted to tell the story of how our coffee gets to us - starting in the forest and ending up in the urban jungle!
It has been inspiring to discover a new material called NatureFlex® - it looks like plastic but it isn't. In fact it's made from wood pulp and it composts quickly and easily, even at home. Of course, the card is completely recyclable too.
It was interesting to spend a few weeks doing some experiments around post-roast de-gassing too (well, interesting for me anyhow). We've figured out that if we leave the coffee to de-gas for around 36 hours before sealing it in bags, then we don't need to use plastic de-gassing valves in our packaging. (It is widely believed that these valves protect the coffee from the gases that naturally escape from the coffee in the day or two after it is roasted. This is a myth. They will merely stop the bags from exploding if they expand too much during the de-gassing period. In reality, they actually keep the gases in the packaging and in contact with the coffee - whether this is actually a bad thing is debatable but it's clear to us that there are no quality benefits from using valves).
Hopefully you'll like the new boxes. You can find more information about our packaging here - please reuse, recycle and compost them wherever you can and don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any thoughts, comments or ideas about how we can do even better in the future.
