Selling the facts

This is a cost friendly concept for Stumptown Coffee by Packaging designer Fritz Mesenbrink. The Stumptown Coffee package includes slits for color coded cards that contained information about the coffee blend, grower information and location. This is a very "clever" idea since consumers are constantly aware of where their coffee comes from. Still this comes from a very common strategy of selling the story about fair-trading. For instance, Coffee giant Starbucks, in almost everywhere they claimed to got the most exotic and most fair traded coffee beans. Why do these producers put so much effort in showing how much they care about their foreign coffee farmers? The main reason is because coffee is all about socializing, culture, friendship from the outside, but for the inside it's always about the money. For profit-aimed companies it's nothing but the selling grades of course.

Selling the Talk

In this dutch commercial of the well-known coffee brand Douwe Egberts, we see a story about a child and his father. The kid is selling his father a talk by serving him a cup of Douwe Egberts while the father picks up his, probably bad schoolreport, and instantly got the idea. The commercial ends with a pay-off which says: "Every good conversation starts with Douwe Egberts"

Here below is a picture of the package back then in 2007 when the commercial was shot. Is this commercial also a reflection to the reality of child-education. Because the kid knows clearly which pack contains the coffee and how to set up the coffee properly. However there is no word of 'Coffee' mentioned on the package of Douwe Egberts itself. But the red color might associate with the regular package of coffee since the other famous coffee brand like Senseo and Illy also use the color red and dark-brown. Red is really a powerful color, combining the dark-brown emphasize the sharp roasting of the coffee. This symbolic is the most used translation in packaging design. Knowing this fact, Red is more of less a superficial marketing color.

Selling the Flexbox

Like 20 years ago, our roasted coffee beans were packaged in anything but a paper tin-tie bag or metal can. This began to change in 1974 when Fres-Co invented the one-way valve for coffee packaging, named the Conor Packaging. With this new innovation, coffee packaging and the consumer's perception of "fresh" changed forever. Nowadays, the most educated coffee consumers associate a one-way valve with total freshness in a prepackaged coffee.

Conor: Is a "one of a kind" package that transforms a flexible laminate into a semi-rigid flexible box. Fitted with a simple peel seal opening and a re-closable flap. This technique of Conor packaging is called in 1996 as the future of coffee packaging, because of it's flexibility.

The packaging will probably remind us of the French sweet: 'Nougats' rather than coffee. Maybe this is the unthought marketing strategy to sell coffee as a cultural confectionary. Coffee is associated with fresh ingredients like roasted almond, walnut, sugar and honey.

Selling the Stories

Nowadays web shops sells these popular 'upcycled' burlap bag of jute. They named it the Coffee bag and make it sell for a minimum of 50 euro each. It is surely true that coffee bags has a good holding strength since it can nearly hold fifty kilo's a sack of 88x160mm.
Nevertheless the bag has also 'fantastic' stories to them. The farms that this coffee sack comes from is what they confirm, FAIR TRADE farms, which means that there has been no exploitation of the workers on the coffee/tea plantations. But to be honest, how many costumers will care about fair trade if the bag tears after a week?

At the beginning there was

COFFEE!
It has been believed that Ethiopian ancestors of today's Oromo people were the first to discover and recognize the energizing effect of the coffee bean plant. But the Ethiopian folk didn't keep the secret for long. From the place where it was found, coffee is spread to Egypt and Yemen. The earliest credible evidence of their knowledge about drinking coffee appears in the middle of the fifteenth century, in the Sufi tribe of Yemen. People brought the beans to Arabia where today's Starbuck's and other coffee houses recipes are founded.

Coffee has been moving from place to place. In the time of Egypt people moved their beans in bags. Most of the time these were large cloth sacks. Farmers dispense their crops into these bags for the purpose of transport, and the bags can be used to transport beans at various stages of curing and roasting. Most are extremely heavy. The bag is usually stamped with information indicating where it comes from, what kind of beans are inside, what grade has been assigned to the contents, and so forth. Some people collect such bags as curiosities, since they can be colorful or have interesting decorations. Nowadays there are a more and more package to think of, most of them based on marketing.

Mapping the package