A Story Behind Every Coffee: Custom Stand Up Pouches Provide a Creative Canvas for Coffee Branding

When I started COROCO, the vision was really centered around creating exceptional coffee and giving people an opportunity to experience coffee differently. Sycamore is a relatively small town, and as the first local coffee roaster, I wanted to create a place where people felt comfortable asking questions, learning about coffee, and discovering what they liked without feeling intimidated by it. The idea was approachable excellence: take the coffee and the craft seriously, but never make people feel like they needed to be coffee experts to enjoy it.

I wanted to be hands-on with the entire process, from selecting coffees and developing roast profiles to thinking about how someone first encounters that coffee on the shelf.

Over time, that vision has become much bigger. COROCO has evolved into a collection of coffees and brands that each have their own personality and story, but they all come back to the same thing: the coffee has to be good.

As a roaster, I love that balance between creativity and precision. You can take two coffees from different origins and they can tell completely different stories. I think our branding has naturally evolved to reflect that. Instead of trying to make everything look exactly the same, we have given ourselves permission to let the personality of the coffee influence how it is presented.

That sense of curiosity still goes back to where we started. We want people to ask questions, try something they might not normally choose, and experience really good coffee in a way that feels welcoming rather than exclusive.

I have always looked at COROCO as the roaster and the creative house behind the coffee, rather than requiring every coffee we produce to look like another version of the same product.

Some coffees inspire a completely different idea, audience, or feeling. Diner Coffee is a great example. It has its own personality and visual language. Trying to force that into the same packaging system as every other COROCO coffee would actually take away some of what makes it fun.

Creating distinct brands gives us room to tell different stories while still maintaining the standards behind them. The common thread isn’t necessarily that every bag looks alike. The common thread is that COROCO roasted what’s inside it.

Packaging gives someone their first introduction to a coffee before they ever smell it, brew it, or taste it.

Visually differentiating our coffees gives us another way to communicate what someone is about to experience. Some coffees can be playful. Others feel more refined or adventurous. The packaging helps establish that personality immediately.

It also gives each brand room to build its own identity. Rather than creating one package and simply changing the name of the coffee, we can think about who that coffee is for, where it might be sold, what story we want to tell, and how we want someone to feel when they pick up the bag.

That’s probably the designer in me coming through. I don’t really separate the coffee from the experience around it. The roast, the name, the story, and the package all become parts of the same creative process.

I have always looked at COROCO as the roaster and the creative house behind the coffee, rather than requiring every coffee we produce to look like another version of the same product.

Some coffees inspire a completely different idea, audience, or feeling, and often those ideas have a personal connection for me.

Interlude, for example, reflects my background as a professional violinist. Music was a huge part of my life long before coffee, so Interlude gave me a way to bring those two worlds together. Even the packaging reflects that history. The Interlude bag is black as a nod to the concert black musicians traditionally wear when performing. The name and identity connect to the idea of an interlude itself: a pause between everything else happening in life and a chance to enjoy something created with intention.

Diner Coffee comes from a very different part of my past. My first waitressing job in high school was at a diner in the 1990s. I remember the regulars congregating at the counter morning, afternoon, and evening for a coffee break, conversation, and, because it was the ’90s, usually a cigarette too. Coffee was the common denominator. People knew each other, caught up with each other, and created a little community around that counter.

Diner is a nod to that experience and to something I still love about coffee today. Coffee has an incredible ability to bring people together.

Creating distinct brands gives me room to tell those different stories while still maintaining the standards behind everything we roast. Trying to force Interlude, Diner, and every other coffee into exactly the same visual identity would take away some of what makes each one interesting.

The common thread isn’t necessarily that every bag looks alike. The common thread is that COROCO roasted what’s inside it.

I liked the stand up pouch because it gave us a really nice balance between function and creative flexibility.

From a design perspective, it gives us a great canvas. The front of the pouch has enough uninterrupted space that the artwork can really become part of the personality of the coffee. It also displays well, whether it’s sitting on a retail shelf, in our shop, or being photographed for online sales.

Practically, it’s easy for us to handle, fill, and easy for customers to store, and still gives us the features we need to protect freshly roasted coffee.

I tend to look at packaging from both sides. It has to work well first, but if it also gives me more freedom to create something visually interesting, that’s a pretty easy combination to get excited about.

Coffee never really lets you finish learning.

That’s probably my favorite thing about it. You can spend years roasting and still encounter a new origin, processing method, varietal, or happy accident that makes you rethink something you thought you understood.

I also really enjoy the teaching and mentoring side of the industry. Helping our wholesale partners get established, understand their coffee program, train their teams, and build confidence in what they’re serving is incredibly rewarding. I love being able to share what I’ve learned and help someone go from feeling a little overwhelmed by coffee to genuinely understanding it and getting excited about it.

In a lot of ways, that goes back to our idea of approachable excellence. Great coffee shouldn’t feel inaccessible, whether you’re the person drinking it or the person learning how to serve it.

I love how many different disciplines come together around one cup. There’s agriculture, processing/science, roasting, sensory work, hospitality, design, storytelling, and an enormous amount of human effort along the way.

As a roaster, I get to be somewhere near the end of that very long journey. My job is to respect everything that happened before the coffee reached me and hopefully roast it in a way that allows people to experience what made it special in the first place.

And then, after all of that work, somebody drinks it while they’re half awake on a Tuesday morning. I kind of love that.

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