Reunion Coffee Roasters
Designers | This project was initiated by our in-house senior leadership and marketing team. The design work was completed in collaboration with BlackJet, a locally-based, third-party design and branding agency.
Location | Oakville, Ontario, Canada
Launch date | July 1, 2019
One of the biggest design challenges we faced with this project was using our new brand to more effectively communicate our commitment to sustainability and convey our heritage and legacy as one of Canada’s premier specialty coffee roasters. For 25 years, we’ve remained focused on creating exceptional-tasting coffee, made in a sustainable way. From the farm to the cup to the bag, we wanted this process to demonstrate our progress in these areas. One of the main solutions to this problem was making the move to a sustainable bag. We made the move from plastic (not recyclable) to a PBI-sourced BIOTRE 2.0 bag, 60% compostable and nearly 100% renewable. Not only was this change in alignment with our core values as a Certified B Corporation, but it also showed our commitment to working with our customers, partners and peers in addressing their feedback and concerns. The new bag also helped us to address another piece of customer-driven feedback: product freshness. Our old bag closed with a zipper, while our new bag features a tie, giving customers the ability to keep their roasted beans fresher for longer.
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In addition to the materials used, we also wanted the design of our new retail bag to help us better communicate our brand story. It was critical in the design brief that our many certification logos were central to the design, not applied as an after-thought, and that space was given for us to more show our legacy, heritage and future ambitions as a company. One example of this is the placement and size of our B Corporation logo, featured prominently on the back of the bag. Our B Corp certification is a framework we use to continually measure and evolve our work operating as a sustainable business. We felt strongly that our new retail bag needed to showcase this in words and in design.
Finally, we wanted our new retail bag to be the dominant packaging piece to demonstrate the youthful momentum of our organization and future expansion goals. The secondary logo “R” helps us to achieve this and is an element of the new design that really resonates with our company, customer and peers.
