My favourite part of providing design support to The Canny Goat was doing label design for their roastery's coffee. If you know me, you'll know I love coffee, and I love how something as seemingly simple as packaging design can also be part of growing political awareness.

Coffee is one of the world's largest commodities, and third-wave direct trade coffee roasting is doing a considerably better job of foregrounding the needs of farmers. Companies like Origin Coffee now publish the wholesale prices they buy at, so consumers can have a better understanding of what "paying a good price for coffee" actually means.

As one of the world's largest commodities, coffee production can fade into the background—we're just chasing another cup, or if we're really into it, maybe we're trying to find an interesting taste, or something unique. It's important that we bring coffee farming and production back to the forefront of people's minds when they're drinking it, because as a commodity crop, coffee's history is bound up in centuries of colonialism.

Let's not make too big a claim—designing a coffee label well isn't going to solve centuries of global majority countries' economic and social subjection. What it can do, though, is remind consumers that they are drinking a specialist product that has been well-crafted and that deserves care. Iain (owner of The Canny Goat) once shared with me a story about the 'thousand hands' that might touch a cup of coffee before it's brewed. From growers, right through to processors, wholesalers, roasters, warehouse staff, and baristas—if one link in that chain doesn't treat it with the appropriate care, everyone else's work is wasted.

Minimalist design

When scoping out a coffee label design, we were originally thinking quite simple—following the relatively minimalist tradition that was popular in labelling at the time.

This kind of minimalist labelling was (and still is!) popular. It highlights only the need-to-know elements about a specialist coffee—its origin, its process, the name of the coffee/farm, and its tasting notes. This kind of minimalist design does nothing to situate a coffee in its context, though. Even the tasting notes mentioned here are an act of branding and reflect global minority (i.e., Western) tastes. You might be interested to learn more about how the flavour wheel used in coffee tasting itself reflects global minority tastes and touchpoints by watching this video about decolonising the flavour wheel.

I think it's important people connect with the place that their food and drink is produced. That was part of the Canny Goat ethos, too—wanting to ensure quality and continue to transition more people away from high street coffee which has a reputation for being lower-quality and more extractive from the communities that coffee is produced in.

So by the time we got round to the second batch of coffees—Fazenda Pinhal, Migoti Hill, and Orlando Sanchez—I was keen to make sure we were highlighting the place of production within the label.

Foregrounding production

Maybe you knew, maybe you didn't—but every Canny Goat Coffee label was related to the farm the coffee was grown on.

Understanding coffee processing

The back labels of the coffees evolved over time, too. At first we thought the size of the label was limited by the position of the valve on the bags, so we needed something small. Only the key info could fit. This included something about the distinction between "Natural" and "Washed" coffees, the two main coffee processing methods.

We both thought it was important to try to build this coffee education into the product itself, particularly because a lot of the people that came to The Canny Goat were first time specialty coffee drinkers. Eventually, we realised the valve position wasn't an issue, so I had some more room to play with. I could explain what actually happens in the natural and washed processes, how the coffee beans are removed from the cherry and how that influences the coffee's flavour.

On top of the info about natural and washed coffees, we could do a bit more education about the context of production of the coffee. Where does our coffee come from? Why is a bean from Kenya different than a bean from Burundi? What is the history of coffee in Burundi?

I got to learn so much about each of these coffees, the farms they were grown on, the risks they faced, the political and social context that coffee existed in within that place-and work out how to communicate a slice of that in about five lines.

This allowed us to situate these coffees in their social, economic, political, and historic contexts. Sometimes we'd be highlighting stories of modern day sustainability, others we'd be talking about how coffee farms were destroyed during civil wars. This kind of contextualisation is so important for actually appreciating the things we consume every day.

I love coffee because I love its complexity. It can taste of so many different things, be from so many different places, and of course has the benefit of being a really effective way to wake the hell up.

But I also love coffee because I love its people, its culture. I love places like The Canny Goat (or Good Vibes Cafe in Falmouth—shout out the first coffee shop that stole my heart) because they create an atmosphere that is welcoming, relaxing.

The story of coffee is a story of colonisation, extraction, rampant capitalism, gentrification, of Christian missionaries, of Structural Adjustment Policies by the IMF that restructured countries' entire economies around commodities like coffee. But it's also a story of sustainability, of scientific breakthrough, of intergenerational knowledge transfer, of people trying to make the world better, of community.

So next time you pick up a bag of coffee—or really, any food, drink, or specialty commodity—ask some questions about it. Where's it from? Who made this? How are those people being remunerated? What's life like for them?