Chirp Nature Center Coffee Bags

Packaging Design - Big Bear, California

Chirp Nature Center is a shop in Big Bear, California that sells products for wild birds such as seeds and provides local nature tours. They were looking to add coffee to their product line and was in need of new packaging.

This coffee is triple certified which means it’s USDA Organic, Fair Trade®, and Smithsonian Bird Friendly Certified. Many wild birds we enjoy in North America migrate from Central America’s coffee regions. The coffee you drink ultimately impacts the birds that visit your neighborhood!

I worked with the marketing manager to select 4 popular wild birds to Big Bear to match the different coffee blends that are crowd favorites among local bird watchers; the Western Bluebird, Bald Eagle, Pinyon Jay, and Mountain Quail. I looked at their brand color palette (purple) and designated some nature-inspired colors that I thought would compliment their brand.

The clients loved the first concept and wanted to move forward if I could make the landscape scene more accurate to the Big Bear region. The store actually sits on the edge of a lake with the beautiful San Gorgonio mountains in the background. I researched images of the store and hand-drew the mountains on paper. The client also requested the trees to be “Jeffrey Pine, Sierra Juniper, and White fir” and those were drawn up with pen. I imported the drawings into Adobe Illustrator to create vector artwork for the bag print.

A better Bag Alternative

The coffee bag is made of Biotre Film, an earth-friendly, heat sealable, barrier material. “Biotre Film is made from 60% (by weight) renewable wood pulp. The wood pulp portion is biodegradable. Third party testing per ASTM tests D-6868 and D-6400 confirmed that nearly all of the wood pulp portion will disintegrate into healthy compost over 84 days in a backyard, home composting environment. The remaining 40% (by weight) of the bag is Polyethylene (PE) with an additive that is designed to make it disintegrate significantly faster than standard plastic.”

I also recommended to the client; to keep costs low — I could design 1 bag that could be applied to all 4 flavors. All of the dynamic content would be moved to sticker labels that would be applied to the bags. Each label has a graphic in the right-hand corner that will visually help the customer determine how strong the roast is.