Packaging · Retail · 2026
A coffee brand that had to work on a 60g pouch
A small-batch filter coffee roaster wanted to move from plain sticker-on-foil packs into proper retail packaging, without losing the regulars who recognised the old pack across the counter.
Client
Filter coffee roaster
Scope
4 SKUs + label system
Timeline
3 weeks
Result
Picked up by 3 stores
The brief
Four blends, sold at the roastery counter and increasingly through two neighbourhood provision stores. The existing pack was a printed sticker on a foil pouch — fine at the counter where someone explains the difference between the blends, useless on a shelf where nobody does.
The ask was straightforward: packaging that a stranger could understand in three seconds, and that a regular could still find without reading.
The constraint
The smallest SKU is a 60g trial pouch. Its printable front face is roughly the size of a playing card, and legally it has to carry the FSSAI mark, the net weight, the ingredients, the roast date, the address and a barcode. Whatever design idea survives that is the design.
Design rule that came out of it
Design the smallest SKU first. Scaling a working small pack up to a 500g bag is easy; shrinking a 500g design down to 60g never is.
What I did
- 01 Kept the existing colour. Regulars recognised the deep red before they read anything, so it stayed and became the brand's fixed element across all four blends.
- 02 Coded the blends by a single band of colour rather than four different pack designs, so one artwork template covers the range and new blends cost nothing to add.
- 03 Set Tamil and English at matched optical weight — the blend name reads equally in both, instead of English leading with a Tamil translation underneath.
- 04 Moved every mandatory declaration to a single back panel block, drawn to the printer's dieline so nothing falls into a seal or a gusset fold.
The shelf test
Before approval I printed the front panels at actual size, taped them onto dummy pouches and stood them in a row with six competitor packs bought from a shop nearby. Then I photographed the row from two metres and looked at it as a thumbnail on a phone.
Two of the three concepts vanished into the row. That is a cheaper way to find out than a print run.
The surviving concept was the one with the largest area of flat colour and the fewest elements — which is almost always the answer, and almost never the one that looks most impressive in a presentation.
Outcome
The range went into production three weeks after the first call. Two more provision stores picked it up in the following month, and the template has since absorbed a fifth blend without any new design work — which was the actual point of building it as a system rather than four separate packs.
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