New Bags! Finally!

Finally.

I can't tell you how much longer it took to get these going than we thought it would. For a variety of reasons, the launch of our new bags that merge eco-friendly bags with our new fancy-pants printer to reduce waste and make our bags super customizable took FOR EVER.

But they're here. They're pretty. And they check all our boxes. So far.

The bags themselves were an ordeal. The criteria:

1 - not terrible for the environment (we wrote a lot on this issue in terms of how bags can be bad at the start of life or at the end of life or both.)

2 - somewhat cost effective (of course we could put everything into super awesome reusable and recyclable glass jars but that's expensive and no one wants to pay another $2 for their coffee.)

3 - safe to put your coffee into (we could throw everything into cheap paper bags but that's not going to be a good solution to store your coffee in.)

4 - able to print on (this was by far the hardest piece of the puzzle. We tried literally dozens of different bag materials before we found one.)

We ultimately decided on Biotre 3 bags - they're technically fully compostable (in commercial composting but apparently you can bury it in your yard and eventually it will break down, just not very quickly). You can read more about them, but they're mostly made from plants and ultimately the least worst option we could find that we could also print on. We decided to not include the one-way valves because for the life of us we couldn't find any compelling evidence that this was actually needed for coffee quality and that's a piece of plastic for no good reason.

So thems the bags. We bought a really overpriced commercial printer that actually prints on these things with incredible quality - and now we don't need labels! We can custom print anything we want on (one side) of the bag including the roast date, the weight, whatever we want. Do you want your face on a bag of coffee? We can do that now.

And that's that. A slog to get here, but we're very happy with the end result and excited to share with you our new not-so-garbage-for-the-world bags with at least two less pieces of waste than before.