A New Specialty Coffee Bag, Years in the Making

It has been a while since Amavida made a meaningful change to the way the brand looks.

The last major brand revision came in 2018, and in 2019 that work made its way onto a new specialty coffee bag. Seven years later, it felt like the right moment to look again.

This time, the changes are softer. We worked again with longtime creative partner Kevin Tudball on an uplift rather than a full rebrand: refreshed colors, streamlined typography, a more centered logo, and the retirement of a few familiar elements.

Amavida has grown a lot since that last update. The mission and vision are still tried and true, but the company, the coffee program, and the community around it continue to evolve. The people who drink the coffee, brew it, serve it, sell it, and share it are growing with us too, and it felt like a good time to create something that better reflects where Amavida is today.

The specialty coffee bag was a natural place to bring that work to life.

A Better Fit for the Coffee Inside

The new packaging is more streamlined than the outgoing design. The previous bags used different label colors to distinguish parts of the coffee lineup, while this version uses one consistent classic crest (paper) label and a more unified presentation.

The bag is not trying to explain everything about a coffee. Each coffee has its own page online with tasting notes, sourcing information, and more detail about the people and places behind it.

Its job is simpler: protect the coffee well, present it clearly, and give something special a package that feels worthy of it.

There is already so much care and craftsmanship in the coffee before it ever reaches the bag. Farmers and producers spend months growing, harvesting, and processing it. Then the coffee team evaluates, selects, roasts, tastes, and fine-tunes it before it makes its way to a café, restaurant, grocery shelf, office, or kitchen counter.

The packaging is the wrapping around all of that work.

A Lot of People Helped Bring It Together

This project came together through a lot of conversations, samples, proofs, and adjustments.

Internally, it brought together Dan Bailey, Amavida’s co-founder and CEO; Martin Trejo, director of coffee; me, as program manager and benefit officer; and, at different points, operations manager Colt Austin and others across the team.

Kevin Tudball again led the creative work. He has been part of some of Amavida’s biggest brand projects over the years, and there is something really valuable about working with a designer who already understands the history behind the company. Kevin has a thoughtful way of listening first, learning what matters, and then bringing that into the design.

MT Pack helped turn the concept into a functional bag, working through materials, construction, printing, and production details. Lightning Labels, another longtime partner, helped with the move from the previous white BOPP labels to a classic kraft paper label.

A specialty coffee bag has a surprising number of decisions behind it.

A Goal We’ve Carried for Years

The material change is probably the part of this project that means the most to me personally.

I joined Amavida as an intern in January 2014, working on the company’s first B Corp certification, which we earned that May. Even then, I remember conversations about finding a better coffee bag — something compostable, bio-based, or simply less dependent on the layered plastic structures available at the time.

It has been an industry challenge for years.

Coffee packaging has a difficult job. It needs to protect against oxygen and moisture, hold up through production and shipping, seal consistently, and keep coffee fresh. A material that sounds good from a sustainability standpoint is not especially useful if it cannot reliably do those things.

The options have improved, and Amavida has grown into a place where some of those options are finally attainable.

The new 4-ounce, 12-ounce, and 2-pound bags are commercially compostable, and the labels have moved from white BOPP to paper. For people with access to commercial composting, that creates a better end-of-life path for a meaningful portion of the packaging.

It is not a perfect solution, but it is real progress.

For a small, independently owned business, access matters too. More responsible packaging often comes with larger minimum orders, more storage needs, higher costs, and different supply-chain requirements. Amavida simply could not have made this move at every point in its history.

The continued support of the people who buy the coffee, visit the cafés, and work with Amavida as wholesale partners has helped the company grow into a place where this investment finally makes sense.

That makes the change feel especially worth celebrating.

Still Working on the Five-Pound Bag

There is one important exception.

The new 5-pound bag is not compostable.

Finding a compostable material that can reliably hold five pounds of coffee is still difficult. Larger bags have to withstand much more weight and stress, and many compostable structures do not consistently perform well enough for that job.

Rather than force a solution that was not ready, the 5-pound bag will continue using a different material for now.

There are a few other things we are still learning too. We may explore different packaging for Reserve and micro-lot coffees in the future, and we want to pay attention to how the new bags perform once they are being filled, shipped, opened, and used every day.

One tradeoff is already easy to see. The paper-based structure does not always tear quite as cleanly as some of the previous layered materials, especially around the e-zip opening.

I can live with a little torn paper.

All four primary sizes — 4 ounce, 12 ounce, 2 pound, and 5 pound — now have an e-zip closure, something we previously only had on some sizes. That should help people reseal the bag and protect the coffee between brews.

If the more responsible material looks slightly less perfect when it tears, that feels like a fair trade.

A Really Good Beginning

Amavida has been fortunate to work with a number of packaging partners over the years, including Savor Brands, Roastar, Pack Plus, Lightning Labels, and now MT Pack. Each has helped solve different challenges and expand what has been possible for a small coffee company as materials and technology have changed.

This bag is not the finish line.

It is a really good beginning.

There is still a compostable 5-pound bag to solve, more to learn about how these materials perform over time, and plenty of room to keep improving. But after more than a decade of talking about better coffee packaging, there is something genuinely exciting about seeing much of that goal finally sitting on the packing table at the roastery.

Most of all, I never want the package to overshadow what it holds.

The coffee begins with farmers and producers whose knowledge, skill, care, and stewardship create the quality in the first place. It continues through everyone who helps move that coffee forward — importing, tasting, roasting, brewing, serving, and sharing it.

The bag just gets the privilege of carrying it.

And after all these years, it feels really good to have packaging that carries that story a little more thoughtfully too.