Packaging

Packaging (aka the bane of our life!)

We love roasting coffee, and we also love drinking coffee ... but a byproduct of this marvellous job is the inevitable issue of packaging our product.

A coffee bag has a few jobs it must perform in order to be useful.

  • It must hold coffee!
  • It must shade the coffee from degrading UV light.
  • It must block out oxygen and moisture (both major foes to freshness).
  • It needs to stand out, look good, and convey useful information about itself and the company.
This is actually quite a lot for just a bag, and makes it all the more sad that it's destined for a very short life! With the rise of popular alternatives to plastic that claim to be "sustainable", we're constantly taking a deep dive into the world of packaging to find a solution that not only ticks the necessary boxes, but is by far and away the most simple to dispose of in the most responsible way to households across the UK.

Pilgrims Coffee Bags

In good old Pilgrims fashion, you will have noticed a gradual shift in our packaging over the past couple of months, from paper to some generic labelled white bags to our now more sleek looking pre-printed PCR(post consumer recycled) LDPE4(Low density polyethylene no.4) bags.

Why the shift from paper?

We felt absolutely smitten with our paper bags. They ticked the boxes; functional, UK manufactured, recycled and recyclable, FSC approved, simple to responsibly dispose of, and with our cute custom designs we thought we had secured the perfect vessel to house our freshly roasted coffee.


That was until the manufacturer fell into administration and ceased to offer FSC approved paper. Our faith in the validity of other sustainable claims was in question also, so it was time to seek another option.

Andrew has exhaustively searched for alternative paper options, but with the imminent need for bags, there was no paper option that we could find that we felt confident about.


That is why, at least for now, we have chosen to move to PCR LDPE4 bags.
This may seem like a strange direction to take given our endless quest for the most sustainable packaging, but after extensive research we feel that in the current climate LDPE4 offers the lowest environmental impact, and compared to other packaging, is becoming easier to responsibly dispose of nationwide.

You may still receive your coffee in our previous paper bags until such times as we run out of our remaining stock, it'd be nice to just make a clean break but it would involve unnecessary waste. These bags are paper curbside recyclable.


To explore the options for your local LDPE4 disposal, please click the link here.

The bespoke illustrations on our bags are the creation of award winning digital artist Theo Scott.