It’s in the bag

It’s in the bag was Originally Posted on July 8, 2005 by lavarock

One of my neighbors, a coffee farmer, called me the other day with a problem. She had an order for lots of small bags of coffee for a convention and needed help. I agreed to supply 250 two ounce bags of ground coffee in the next few days.

Although I usually sell 4oz, 8oz and 1 pound bags of whole beans, I sometimes provide smaller bags of ground coffee for parties or stocking stuffers.

I hauled 60 pounds of beans up to my roaster who did a medium roast and ground the coffee for me. You have no idea what a mess it can be to grind that much coffee. The interesting thing about coffee is that when you roast the beans they lose weight but gain volume, kinda like popcorn in a way. You can actually put different roasted beans next to each other and see how the size of the bean differs as it roasts darker.

Then I had to set my “staff” on the task of creating the labels and labeling the bags (you DO know that I am a staff of 1, don’t you?).

Since all my official labels for regular coffee bags are professionally printed, I have to create the 2 ounce labels on my trusty HP Deskjet. I found a regular white address label that fits and made 14 labels per page. Since ink jet printers from HP use a vegetable dye, the ink is not waterproof. I bought some Krylon Kaymar Varnish that coats the labels and makes them water resistant.

To create a template to hold the bags and get the labels on straight, I took a manila folder, folded it and taped it to the table. Then I could position the bag in the small pocket and get the labels attached just right.

My neighbor needed some strips that said 2oz to cover up a different size on her labels and I created them too. After putting the Karmar on them, they pretty closely matched her bag and look quite good. Big farms can go spend thousands of dollars on professional labels for every sized bag, but we small farmers have to make do. I guess that also helps us try to keep costs down and give more personalized service.

Tomorrow I head to a different farm where a friend will help me fill and seal the bags. Then sometime the beginning of next week they are on their way to the convention and hundreds of people will experience a bit of Kona Coffee and a bunch of Aloha!