If you've been looking closely at my labels lately you may have noticed a couple little changes! Lets chat about what's changed, and why!
Roast Style
Let's start with the big one! The Roast style appearance.
When I started Almanac, I had seperate roast styles. I had dedicated filter roasts and I had dedicated espresso roasts and the packaging reflected this. Over time I had come to realise just how similar the roast profiles were as I tend to prefer my espresso roasts a touch less developed than traditional styles, and the opposite for the way I enjoyed filter roasts. It became clear that my filter and espresso roasts were very similar in style so I decided to merge the marginal difference and roast everything as the 'omni roast' style.
At the time this wasn't too popular and Omni roasts had quite the negative stigma around it for being a lazy persons roasting style. While it's absolutely true that my work flow has been much easier, and the wastage has been reduced, the lazy approach wasn't the reasons for the change.
About a year ago, I removed all roasting tags from my packaging and mentioned nothing about roast style. I think most people understood my style was omni by this stage and honestly the perception of omni roasters has really developed into a stylistic choice as opposed to a ease of workflow one, and the change has been mostly resistance free! However I still get asked here and there about the roast style and when patrons order online it's a little confusing without clear labelling. Which brings us to today's post.
My packaging now clearly states my roasting style. OMNI ROAST! Nothing has changed roasting wise, my profiles are the same and the coffee you've hopefully come to enjoy will still be the same, it's purely just the labelling on the packaging and being more transparent which I think is really important. I think this change is honestly quite overdue, and I shouldn't have let perception slow me down to convey the style, but I have, ah well!
Minor Rearrangements
The other thing that has change on the packaging is that under ALMANAC at the top of the packaging, it no longer says SINGLE ORIGIN, it has been replaced with COFFEE ROASTERS which shows my proper branding and logo.
I honestly think my branding is fairly weak. Business Brand marketing definitely isn't my strength. It initially made sense in my head for it to say single origin right? The single origin says single origin and the blends says blend, awesome! Except, I think it's also fairly clear that it's a single lot by all the farm information on the labels. And having SINGLE ORIGIN and COFFEE ROASTERS on the label looked far too cluttered. So I've made the decision to just scrap it, and try work on strengthening my branding and having my proper logo on the label. I'm happy with the decision! I also think it's pretty obvious now that it's a single origin by all the additional info on the bag. Maybe I'm wrong? Let's find out!
What's next?
I think for now, I'm content. Printed bags with more visual aspects will be the next goal but probably nothing too soon. I'll likely also try find a way to condense the back label information that contains information on varietals and region, and place it on the front label. That way I can have things like my website or store address (in future), and contact info on there. Would also be great to have the lovely Triangle almanac logo somewhere on the packaging too!
Let me know what you think of the small changes I've made, do they look good? bad? keen to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for reading, Have a great day!
-Robbie.