Coffee Design: Atlas Coffee Club

Now here’s something a little different. The Atlas Coffee Club delivers coffees in glorious packages that are vibrant expressions of the locations the coffee comes from. Co-Founder Jordan Rosenacker tells us they draw inspiration from the textiles and landscapes from each source and use the entire front of the bag as a canvas—free of logos, text, or branding. We spoke with Rosenacker digitally to learn more.

Tell us a bit about your company.

Would love to, thanks for asking :) We designed Atlas Coffee Club to tell the story of coffee from around the world. From Tanzania, to Ethiopia, Peru to Burundi, each month we introduce a new single-origin coffee from a new country and highlight its unique coffee flavor and culture.

When did the coffee package design debut?

August 2016.

And we’re currently working on three new coffee bag designs to be added this year to showcase our new countries and regions. :)

Who designed the package?

We designed the packaging in-house and worked with a couple of friends to add a few different layers of creative interpretations.

The Executive Creative Director: Jordan Rosenacker. Designer: Donny Zellefrow.

 

What coffee information do you share on the package?

The only text we have on our coffee bag is the country name on the side with our logo in a smaller font beneath it.

While it doesn’t include text, the front of our coffee bags are filled with information. To further tell the story of coffee from around the world we created our coffee bags to be all patterned designs inspired from local landscapes and textiles; each coffee bag was created to connect the coffee consumer to the country. Be it via our Costa Rican coffee bag that was inspired from the 19th-century ox carts used to transport coffee. Or via our Brazilian coffee bag that was created to celebrate Brazil’s remarkable biodiversity; inspired by nature’s ability to seamlessly coexist and cohabit as one.

What’s the motivation behind that?

At the core of each interaction with Atlas Coffee Club we want our visitors, subscribers, and customers to feel more connected to the countries producing the coffee. We essentially try and operate as coffee tour guides, connecting coffee lovers and coffee newcomers to each country, making it a seamless process, and working to not get in the way. We want to celebrate the various cultures and regions from around the world and not interrupt the experience with branded distractions like logos and branded language.

If we can connect our subscribers to the country their coffee is coming from, then we’ve done our job. To encourage the imagination to journey 9,028 mi from Texas to Tanzania, where the Serengeti has its illuminated golden sprawl and where coral reefs and whale sharks surround the island of Zanzibar… We want our subscribers to experience this journey through the coffee and to have an appreciation that stretches beyond going to the grocery store and grabbing a bag off of the shelf.

We hold ourselves to a tour-guide standard, making sure we do our best to curate and show our subscribers the best coffee each country has to offer. Our cupping sessions involve 25-30 different coffees and through all channels of communication we operate with the understanding that you can’t refund a “vacation.” What this means for us is a lot of our subscribers might only try Congo coffee once and we want that first impression to be a good one.

Where is the bag manufactured?

The United States of America.

Is the package recyclable/compostable?

Not currently but we hope to introduce this soon along with additional ways of supporting the environment.

We’re also currently working on a competition that encourages our customers to repurpose our coffee bags after using them. We’ve had a number of subscribers repurpose them into art projects and we’re excited to develop this / see where it can go!

Where is it currently available?

Online via our website.

Thanks so much!

Coffee Design is a feature series by Zachary Carlsen on Sprudge. Read more Coffee Design here.

Photos courtesy of Atlas Coffee Club.