Why We Ditched the Classic Jute Coffee Bag

At the Genuine Origin Coffee Project, we’ve enlisted a global team of farmer support experts to begin transforming revenue models at origin for coffee producers. And for specialty roasters, we’ve stepped away from the status quo in a number of ways, to make buying and roasting green coffee beans simpler than it’s ever been.

We offer online shopping and flat rates that don’t fluctuate with the C market price (more on that another day). And we sell our green coffee beans in easy-to-stack 65-pound boxes, inside of which the beans are sealed in GrainPro bags. (GrainPro is pretty much the industry standard and does a great job of hermetically sealing and protecting the beans from pests, moisture, molds and odors — even the scent of the jute bags, which the GrainPro bags often go inside of.)

We offer online shopping and flat rates that don’t fluctuate with the C … and we sell our green coffee beans in easy-to-stack 65-pound boxes.

While they’re a nostalgic symbol of coffee, jute bags are easily punctured. When a forklift scoops up a pallet, it’s common for it to rip any bit of a bag that’s hanging down through the wooden slats. And because they’re so unwieldy, even just moving and stacking jute bags can puncture the GrainPro bags inside.

Tony Auger, now a regional partnership manager at Genuine Origin, used to be a roaster at Kaldi’s Coffee Roasting Co. He explains:

Jute bags weigh between 132 and 154 pounds each, and 10 fit on a pallet. They also don’t arrive via FedEx or UPS — you’re using warehousing companies or freight companies to move your coffee around for you, and sometimes they have to unload your coffee from truck to truck.

When I was accepting green coffee orders … maybe three times a week we would have a pallet delivered with a coffee bag that had fallen off and had to be re-stacked. Or someone would drive the forklift through the bag and puncture it, so you’d have to rip the bags off the pallet and weigh each one to figure out how much coffee you’d lost and then report it. It was such an extra headache to deal with.

With the boxes, you don’t have the problem with the forklift — they just sit neatly on top. And, they’re less likely to fall over. If you have boxes on a pallet and they shrink wrap that pallet, it’s not going to move, in the way that bags will still roll off.

For smaller roasters with 15-kilo machines, who roast around 10 pounds of beans at a time, a 65-pound box means you’re consistently roasting and selling fresher beans. Opening a 150-pound bag to roast 10 pounds at a time, it could take months to go through the beans, which by the end are going stale.

“It’s the difference between roasting three to six times and then opening a fresh, sealed bag, versus roasting 10, 15, 20 times before you can start fresh again,” says Auger.

Simply put, he adds, “With green and roasted beans, the more oxygen that hits them, the more stale they become. That’s also why we package our 300-gram samples at Origin, versus other companies, which have to open the big bags in the warehouse in order to cup them. They have to stick the trier in to grab the beans, and that means breaking the GrainPro seal.”

For smaller roasters …working with a 65-pound box means you’re consistently roasting and selling fresher beans.

As for the mess of dealing with logistics and warehousing companies, we ship boxes via UPS Ground, and customers can choose their shipping date. Flat-rate shipping prices and tracking numbers also help to keep it stress free. Boxes can be ordered one at a time (though certainly also more), arrive with the mail, and are easy to stack or stick in a corner.

Have questions? You can email us at info at genuineorigin.com, or call Jess Hobbs, our incredibly helpful and friendly customer service colleague, at 646.828.8585 between 9 and 4:30 PM EST.

Curious about our beans? We offer 100 percent free samples — shipping’s on us. Just click over to our store and let us know what you’d like to try.

To learn more about The Genuine Origin Coffee Project, please visit our site, or say hi on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.