Forty Ninth Parallel Introduces New Block Bottom Bag

We have changed up the bottom of the bag so that it sits better on a shelf; it now has a flat bottom, and we’ve also made it a little bit shorter, so it should eliminate any tipping over.

Aug 26 2011 --- It's time to unveil our new coffee bags. Earlier this year we launched the new website, with a fresh look - a look that we think more accurately captures who we are: and we’ll be moving everything to this design over the coming months. Stock of the old bags is dwindling and we’re going to roll out the new ones next week.

The new bags incorporate a few changes, which are designed to make them more versatile and more retail friendly. The current version has served us well, and taught us many things, but the new ones should display better, and hopefully inspire more retail sales on your end.

The most noticeable change is a switch from the blue and brown to a style more in line with the new website. The blue and brown served us well, but it's been 5 years, and if you spend even a fraction of the time looking at coffee bags as we do, you’ll probably notice blue and brown on a coffee bag is no longer unique.

We have changed up the bottom of the bag so that it sits better on a shelf; it now has a flat bottom, and we’ve also made it a little bit shorter, so it should eliminate any tipping over.

We've changed to a primarily matte bag. The matte finish should eliminate any glare issues with direct lighting. We’ve run into this with halogen track lights or spotlights in the past: which just happen to be popular retail shelf lighting.

Colours. We're going with 3 bags: brown for the espressos, mint for the single origins and cream for decaf. Goal here is to make it easy to identify the bags, whether they're on the shelf in a cafe, or you're digging through boxes in  the back room trying to find another bag of Epic. If you’re curious about the colours, check out the website: everything is moving to that look.

For the decaf, we’re going to move to a 340g/12oz bag, just like the filter coffees. The smaller portion should keep the coffee fresher in the hopper, or in the cupboard at home, and we’ve found that most people find a full pound of decaf to  be too much.

The last thing: we’ve come up with a direct-trade sticker to ensure that the coffees which Mie, our green coffee buyer is sourcing direct from origin are clearly marked as such. We’re really, really happy with the way this is progressing from both a quality and sustainable farming standpoint, and we want to really drive home to consumers that there is a better way than just fair-trade.

So when is this going down? We’re aiming for the week of July 18 to start shipping. For right now, it’s just the retail bags but the 5lb bags will move in the same direction, as well as our paper cups and everything else.