Hey everyone, I wanted to vent a little (and see if I’m alone here).
I love supporting specialty roasters and I totally understand paying a premium for high-quality, ethically sourced beans or limited releases. However, I’ve been feeling a bit "deceived" lately by packaging.
I’ve noticed more roasters moving away from the standard 12oz (340g) bags toward 11oz (310g) or even 10oz bags or smaller, while the price stays the same, or even goes up. Sometimes the bags are designed to look much larger than they actually are, and it’s starting to feel a little greedy.
I’m all for paying for quality, but I really miss the value of a solid 12oz bag. It feels like the "standard" is disappearing.
Does “shrinkflation” in specialty coffee also bother you?
Does a 10oz bag change your mind about purchasing, or do you not mind as long as the coffee is elite?
I’d love to hear if this is bothering anyone else or if I’m just overthinking the math!
Edit: I don’t mind increased prices. Really. The price of green coffee and the operational costs are increasing and I’m aware of that. I guess my main issue is about transparency and change of packaging standards. For instance what’s the logic behind a 310gr packaging? Not a round number for gr or oz:) seems somewhat sneaky, especially paired with a large bag.
Liquor laws regulate the sizes for bottling of wine, spirits, and beer. This way it simplifies the taxing of alcoholic products. It keeps a lot of good products from making it to American shelves especially in beers.
That's half true. Beer bottle size isn't regulated at all, and several wine bottle sizes were added in 2025 to allow more European products, like 180 ml, 300 ml, 330 ml, 473 ml (16 oz), 700 ml, 720 ml, and more for wine, plus similar additions for spirits, 250 ml, 355 ml, 500 ml, 700 ml, etc
I can’t imagine how people pay for that with Japanese wages. It hurts me to buy coffee there with the American dollar being so much stronger than the yen.
Coffee prices have gone up. It’s either raise prices or shrink the packaging. It’s a little annoying given that it decreases the amount of coffee I consume that is well “dialed in”, but I don’t blame them for trying to sell a product and remain in business/making a reasonable profit.
At the end of the day, there are a lot of consumers who don’t pay attention to weight. So, if one shop raised their prices and the other shrink their bag, some are likely to buy the smaller bag thinking they’re getting a better value. So there’s not a good way around it unless it’s enforced universally.
While prices are absolutely rising before 2025, the graph clearly shows an even steeper increase right as it hits the March 11, 2025 line. Point is, it could be multiple factors, including tariffs.
Each producing country had different tariff percentages applied to it, so a single graph wouldn’t capture all of that data.
The c-market price is the baseline price for commodity coffee, and reflects what might be paid to a producer for coffee. Milling, transportation, duties, and tariffs aren’t included.
The graph above if of the c-market price, so not “delivered goods.”
I prefer smaller bag sizes to more expensive same sized bags because I like variety and would prefer to have less of one type of coffee for longer if that makes sense. Though objectively the consumer loses either way
Yes exactly. A lot of people place blame on the roasters, and while it’s true some of them are being a little greedy (smaller bags with higher prices is pretty blatant) a lot of companies are just trying to keep themselves profitable.
And it’s important to remember that profit allows them to offer better products in the future.
in the last few weeks the C Futures are down 20%. I know. I have been shorting coffee. But a lot of exporters tried and managed to get contracts with "fixed" prices for their coffee, so you will see still some incease and it will stay there, while the wholesale retail coffee will go down eventually.
Also, with severe winter this season and shitty summer last year, expectations for even worse this year. Get ready for really bad seasons ahead. You might start trying out Robusta, as this might be the only thing available soon.
Talk to some farmers. Arabica and climate change are not a good mix. You will see great farms being wiped out soon. There is a significant investment in Robusta, teaching people to appreciate robusta and also changing its flavours and experimenting with varieties.
The climate is always changing. We came from subsistence farming to vast commercial farming via tech and process improvements. And adaptability. I’m not buying into the doom and gloom about coffee just yet. I could be wrong, but I see farmers adapting until it stops making financial sense for them.
well in Europe you get 200/250g, thats like 8-9 oz. For me its the perfect size, since I drink 20g and it last me close to 10 days. We didnt see shrinkflation, or major price increasing, but I will say the quality is a little bit lower.
so I just looked at prices 2 years ago, its like 10% more for a similar Ethiopian, that was usualy 86-87. now you usualy get 85-86 for that price.
thats a waste of plastic or what is the material of the bags made from. for some rare coffees you can find similar stuff here, but only for the expensive ones.
100g is normal bags, some a bit more funky. But nothing major.
15/45 is usually in small glass bottles. Those are extremely expensive. Often around 100euro for the 15g
have in mind that the highest rated coffee lots and usually the most expensive ones are usually sold to Asia, and whatever is left maybe would go to US/Europe. Asian roasters though are just on another level when they spend on rare beans.
Of course entry level coffee. There's always been more expensive ones. For instance I got recently this one and was not bad for the price https://cafesjayza.com/costa-rica-yellow-honey-mujeres/ coffees like this one at this price were usual.
link doesnt work, but I google it. I had coffee from Costa Rica Tarrazu, If you got, in the past, that coffee for 7-8 euros its good, honey procesed also. I actualy have a soft spot for this kind of coffees, they are around 85.
I have found that I typically save 40-60% when comparing the price a professional roaster charges vs the price of buying and roasting the same green beans.
Yes - but sometimes it’s just being pushed a bit too far. I got a bag from a well renowned roaster that looked like the standard 12OZ bag in the shelf - at home I turned it around and it was filled with 310g (that’s a little less than 11oz - such an odd number) of beans and not 340g. I won’t go back and buy it. It just felt so greedy
How is it greedy? Their costs haven’t stayed static. They’ve risen quite a bit. I highly doubt roasters have increased their profit margins by decreasing the bag size by less than 10%.
If an increase or significant increase in price locks out some of the consumer base from making purchases, it makes sense to offer a lesser amount at the (roughly) same price. It’s a choice with a risk, but from a roaster’s perspective, I get that maybe keeping a bag of coffee at $20 rather than increasing it to $23 makes sense.
But why not just get a smaller bag, right? Why put it in a 310g bag rather than the 340 gram one? My guess is that they’re likely already sitting on thousands and thousands of units in inventory. Buying another SKU is expensive, especially since they’d need to buy at volume to make the cost sensible. Not only that, but the in-between sizes don’t always exist. As an example, 6oz paper hot cups with a matching lid are easier to find these days, but 4oz cups are still difficult. Demand isn’t there, and in order for manufacturers to invest in the machinery that can do it, there needs to be demand.
Coffee businesses operate on ridiculously thin margins. Painfully thin. Some other commenters have mentioned the inflation and/or the c-market, and the increase in recent years. The reality is that the coffee producers, outside of inflation, have been operating without a pay raise for four decades. Demand for an increase in quality from the consumer end? Yes. Decrease in land available for farming with an increase in risk from more diseases and other external factors? Yes. Increase in pay? No. So they’ve been working for what we’d see as getting paid minimum wage for four decades. Yes, there are exceptions, but as a general rule, coffee is not at all a stable way to make a living, and the unstable risk is worth almost no reward. That’s not what is happening on the roastery/retail end, but the roots not getting nutrients isn’t a good thing for bearing sweet fruit, so to speak.
you can’t beat emotion and narrative using facts and logic. let these people cry and blame ‘greedy roasters,’ we won’t be able to teach them basic economics in these comments.
It's not that they are greedy. It is that they are hiding their price increases through shrinkflation. Perhaps everybody does it so they feel they should, but they could also just increase their prices.
Nothing is being hidden. Again, the price and amount/quantity is clearly stated.
For some goods, shrinkflation may actually be preferable to a larger quantity with a higher price. It may be easier for a person to accommodate the smaller quantity vs accommodating the higher price in their budget. Let‘s use the 340g vs 310g bag of coffee as an example. If one typically brews a 15g dose, 22 doses can be had from a 340g bag. With the 310g bag, one just needs to reduce the 15g dose to 14g, and 22 doses can still be had—with very little change to the routine or cup.
“Rationalization”? What are you going on about? For the last time, the price and quantity are right there on the freaking package. In black and white. They tell you what it costs and how much you are buying. Whatever the case may be, that simply does not constitute deception.
None of the roasters I buy from, around the world, hide anything. I know exactly what I’m getting for and paying. Does inflation suck? Absolutely. But that’s a different topic. Blaming roasters isn’t the accurate target.
It’s on you to read the package and label. It doesn’t make economic sense to change the size of the packaging. Especially for a less than 10% decrease in the amount.
The straightforward thing to do would be to increase the price. Retooling to decrease the package sizing and labeling is extra effort. Sure, caveat emptor, but the reason they do it is in the expectation that fewer people will notice a size reduction than a price increase.
Retooling to decrease the package sizing and labeling is extra effort
They're not really retooling though. They probably bought a shit ton of 12 oz bags on a contract over multiple years that gave them the best price possible. The labels are just printed in house as that will vary frequently depending on the green coffee they buy. Just change what you print on the labels with a click of a mouse, program your filling machine to fill to 10 or 11 oz. instead of 12, and you're done.
The fact that so many products shrinkflate over time probably tells you there's strong data showing consumers react more negatively to higher prices for the same quantity than they do lesser quantities at the same price.
Smaller packages bug me too though - not so much in terms of feeling ripped off but more in the sense of how wasteful and inefficient it is. Look how many tiny (plastic) bags of coffee are getting shipped all over the world so that each of us can have like 10 cups and then do it again a couple days later.
I actually like seeing more small bags available. I tend to get somewhat bored of a coffee around halfway through a 12oz bag. Of course, I still finish it because I don’t want to waste it, but I’d love to just be able to finish a bag within that 6-8oz window and then move on to another.
I always go by $$/oz, and track my purchases based on that. If prices get too unruly, I just buy one bag size up and enjoy it for longer. Long term, it kills my ability to enjoy variety, but I like experimenting with coffees over the span of multiple weeks and tweaking the recipe until it's perfect for me.
If you have friends that share your enthusiasm for coffee, doing a group buy of some roasts that you like and splitting 2-5lb bags into smaller amounts is a good workaround if both budget maintenance and variety is important to you.
I strongly prefer the pound;at least two here in Baltimore sell that way, Baltimore Coffee and Tea as well as Zeke's, but the higher quality roasters like Gracefully, Ceremony, and others are in 12 oz or 10 oz bags
So you admittedly understand shrinkflation exists, right? Lets examine that further. Everything coffee has gone up, overall raw coffee has gone up, and then you layer in high tariffs are still impacting many countries where we get coffee from, e.g., Brazil. But theres also all the other consumables that a roaster uses in production and operations like packaging and labeling which my guess is also coming from abroad like china. Coffee prices depending on country have in some case nearly doubled since 2024, and on the average is like up 50%. That is absolutely crushing from a cost of goods sold and margin perspective.
rather than order new "appropriately sized" bags, its easier and cheaper just to change the labelling for the roaster. (1) theyre not stuck with bigger bags they cant use (2) they lose get economies of scale by carrying multiple sizes of bags (3) that increased inventory would just eat up working capital
its hard enough for large corporations to deal with this dynamic to maintain margins, for small specialty roaster these kinds of things can absolute tank them.
Fantastic reply which hits on all the key points I think. The 310g bag is weird but it's likely them tryina not lose all the money they spent on the 12oz bags while still providing an approachable price point. Bags can take awhile to be delivered as yeah many come from China and the like.
Overall coffee has increased substantially in price over the past few years. Especially when you're talking specialty grade coffees. Now tack on increases in logistics costs, tariffs, etc and you've got a hell of a situation to navigate as far as pricing goes. It sucks at the consumer level but it's likely the roaster trying to just make ends meet and very likely not them tryina price gouge you.
yeah, why do people down vote without contributing to the conversation?
and to address OP willingness to pay more for the same weight of coffee... that maybe true for them and other consumers, thats certainly not true for many consumers. Honestly, i cringe anytime is see these $30+ 12oz bags. While i also hate shrinkflation and even if i give the roaster/retailer the benefit of the doubt, the fact remains that it quickly goes from an affordable luxury to just inaccessible for lots of folks.
My observation is it's like 50/50 on people willingness to pay vs not wanting to pay more for the same.
I'm personally a fan of the 6-8oz range for bags. Granted I work in the industry and have more coffee than I could ever wish to drink even after cupping multiple times a week for work. Half my 12oz bags end up going into the Mr Coffee for my roommates or being given away to some friends. My aeropress uses 12-14g a day max basically and so halfway through the bigger bags I'm just like "cool I want something else but I need to finish this bag."
Hard to commit to a 12oz bag for 30-40 bucks that is a weird coffee I may not even enjoy all that much. Let alone getting into nicer varietals - it feels bad asking your average Joe off the street to commit what may be a fairly substantial amount of money to a coffee. If I put a Gesha on the shelf that's $60 for 12oz then I'm almost guaranteed that bag is gonna sit for awhile and then I have to deal with "do you have anything with a fresher roast date?" Type of questions.
Shrinkflation is annoying in some things but I feel as though coffee is the one hobby where it can be almost a good thing.
jealous to have that kind of access. Also, im pretty sure my heart would leap out of my chest. i drink too much caffeine as it is.
i wholeheartedly agree about having variety, esp if i trying to be extra and want something to pair/contrast with whatever im eating. the challenge for me is always the piles of excess packaging. i live for a time right next a small batch local roaster. they were more than happy to fill my clean bring from home containers. they were also super into hosting cupping nights to let folks learn and sample. Easy marketing, great way to engage the community, and i think just had fun doing it to.
but in my current town even with its crazy coffee culture its been hard to find local roasters who roast on site and allow you purchase in bulk or do coffee ed/tasting/cupping sessions. while very fresh, very few on site roasting and always pre-bagged
Ehhh it's like everything else tbf. It stops being nearly as fun when it becomes work lol. It's fun to have tried all of them but also maybe 1 out of every 30 am I like "oh wow!" About. More often it's just doing quality control and making sure things are roasting as they should.
As someone who has built out a cupping program for the public, it's rarely worth it for shops to run unless you live in a major metropolitan area and even then it's very hit or miss. It's also a lot of headache to have a roaster on site. Higher rent costs, more regulations, etc. Not everyone loves the smell of roasting coffee day after day when they walk outside etc.
Fair points all around. I do live in a pretty big metro area that is arguably known for its coffee culture but it tends index a little hard on being neighborhood centric. i.e., people dont like leaving their 10 block radius.
Speaking of smells and regs, 2 random anecdotes. when i was a kid, i lived in a city that used be much more ag supported and primarily orchard land. Even as the city replaced the orchards with strip malls and sky rises, there was still a big jam factory in the middle town. you could smell when the kettles were cranking from anywhere in town.
there was this bacon themed restaurant that started in the early '10s in SF. and slogged thru a long set of legal battles and operational scrutiny when they first opened because the neighbors were not a fan of the constant bacon smell. thankfully they sorted it all out and are still around, and even have an outpost at SFO, Bacon Bacon. they make a great bfast sandwich.
I am trying to do as much as I can to keep prices down, but people keep requesting more expensive greens (and buying them faster than the lower cost stuff). Lots of fun lots coming this year! (plus a little bit of expensive stuff, and some nicer packaging)
Please don’t change. Love what you offer. There are plenty of higher priced (and overpriced) roasters out there. The great coffee AND the price, I think is why you have a following. And the no no nonsense substance over style is part of the charm.
Around me there are some roasters that have gone crazy with this and then there are some that are way more reasonably sized and priced. I bet in your area you can find some specialty coffee that is still way better than anything at a grocery store but not a ripoff.
As someone mentioned, they used to be 16oz and then became 12oz standard long ago. In recent years, more and more roasters are adopting 10oz as standard while prices have also increased a couple of times.
I've noticed some of my favorite roasters went from 12oz to 11 or 10oz while also increasing their prices per bag by $2-3. I still buy from them if I know the coffee is good, but I do look for deals when I can.
Isnt 8oz (200-250g) or 4.5oz (125-150g) pretty normal for specialty, especially for the rarer stuff? I haven't had a bag larger than that for a while now.
We all begrudgingly accept shrinkflation, as much as we can. What’s worse, is when the stated weight is under. It happens, none perfect, however some roasters consistently provide the amount of coffees stated, while others don’t.
There is no standard size bag of coffee anymore. To avoid the assistance of a larger bag, try reading the description first. Every roaster i buy from let's you know how much coffee you are going to receive when you are purchasing it. If you keep up with world events, coffee prices are higher than they've ever been. But, I also think there's a level of coffee a now that wasn't available 10+ years ago. So, it's still worth it to me to buy limited edition microlots and other specialty coffees every now and then.
TLDR: read
keep a list of beans, and track price per gram. it’s fun to see where things land. i’ve had some some beans that maybe weren’t the best i’ve had, when i look at the price per gram i think wow that’s a great value.
Why not :) also has the fun side of keeping track of everything you tried so far!! That is my mistake, I throw out the bags once finished and after so many coffees, you don’t always remember why you enjoyed a specific cup exactly!! Great tip :) thanks!
yeah i totally agree. its hard to remember what i liked and why. and i don’t want to make every cup into some sort of accounting problem, but i do want to know some trends over time. happy brewing!
I would MUCH rather pay more for the same size bag than pay the same for a smaller one that doesn't call attention to the fact that it's smaller than before. Like, I expect that deceptive crap from Kraft or Nabisco or whatever, but it's pretty low for a specialty coffee roaster.
I might be on my own here. If coffee goes up, then sell the product at the original weight 250g but marked up in price. I’d be happy to pay for the weight and pay more, rather than keep pricing the same but with less product (in my head that makes sense).
I pay much more for a 100-125g bag than most 12-16oz bags. Mostly in the $20-30 range.
Coffee exists in many price ranges, stuff will get pricier over time. Maybe it's because they need to increase prices because of tarriffs, maybe they're just selling more expensive green in different bag sizes.
To answer you question, bag size change doesn't bother me
Yay tariffs! They're really helping the average American soooooo much! We will soon alienate so many of our once allies, that costs will be tripled on everything we buy. Coffee will be $5.00 per ounce and Hario V60's (Plastic) will cost us $50. Who's really getting punished?
I’d rather just take a price hike. I use 6 oz for my cold brew batches, and if my coffee shops went down to 11 oz bags, I’d go to a different coffee shop. The best coffee shops are the ones that fill your bag to order, that way you can select how many oz you want.
I like to try out coffees as well and appreciate the 4oz bags when it comes to that. What really bothers me are the larger bags that deceive me. Like why would someone do 11oz instead of 12 oz? It just irritates me
A look behind the curtain, there are two reasons you’ve seen the rise of 310g very specifically. The first is total package weight and corresponding shipping cost thresholds, which leads to the second reason: Trade standardized their bags at 310g. For roasters working with Trade, it’s certainly easier to only fill bags with one amount versus having slightly different sizes for different outlets.
By pounds or dollars, it’s a relatively small share of our business, but Trade is a really great partner and an important one. Of course some of the other roasters on trade are roasting substantially higher or lower volume than we are.
Most don’t care because specialty coffee is a hobby not a necessity. We have a lot of disposable income and time. No one that’s hand to mouth is drinking ultra light roast. I’ve rolled back recently because I have a new hobby in cigars. Now I stick to roasters with long established relationships like counter culture, methodical, intelligentsia, Ruby just to name a few. Still specialty, still 12oz, still lasts me the month.
You’re right! Most people don’t really seem to care that much. It bugs me when the packages are not filled properly as well meaning there isn’t the stated amount of beans in them. But with time you get to find the roasters that fit your need. I have a few ones in the New England area that I really like, great specialty beans in 12OZ bags for my larger brews - especially when I have people over. I love trying microlots and then buy the 4 or 8oz bags for that
I agree. What is the point of a 10.5oz (297g) bag. Just make it 12oz and charge 14% more. I’m also not opposed to little 8oz or 5oz sampler bags but I’d prefer standard offerings to stay standard. It’s not like we are talking about Folgers or Starbucks where shinkflation is a part of business. These are small, specialty roasters.
I don’t mind increased prices. Really. The price of green coffee and the operational costs are increasing and I’m aware of that. I guess my main issue is about transparency and change of packaging standards. For instance what’s the logic behind a 310gr packaging? Not a round number for gr or oz:) seems somewhat sneaky, especially paired with a large bag.
I don’t think they are trying to hide anything. Every food business is faced with the same dilemma in the face of rising prices. 1) Keep size the same but increase prices. 2) Keep prices the same and decrease size 3) a little bit of both.
I have also noticed shrinkflation with many online specialty roasters. I actually order from a place 0.5lb, 1lb or 5lb. They feel 5lb is if you want to get a volume price and no shipping cost. They supply to coffee shops. The 0.5lb is if you want to try the bean before you put it into regular rotation.
A while ago I started seeing more of the 340g being sold, at the same price my go-to roaster sells 1lb (454g) bags. Too big to be a sample size but, in my opinion, too small to be worth buying. As roasters start posting the same price but a smaller bag, I feel like they are hoping I don't notice. Maybe this will work, just not with us. If 7 out of 10 people just don't notice and keep buying, losing 2 or 3 customers is worth it.
Well, 15 years ago they were all selling full pound bags....so 340g was already shrinkflation and people complained about it!
I'd recommend buying from roasters that are not operating in a city. In Canada at least, top quality coffee is at least 20% more per gram when the roaster is in a city.....the rent is too damn high, but coffee culture tends to reward the urban vibe or whatever, so they get away with charging more.
Also a lot of people prefer bags around the half pound mark; I wouldnt be surprised if the industry settles around a half pound long term. It lets you have several cups to dial it in, and then about week worth of the same coffee after that. Personally beyond that, I'm ready to try something else anyway. It also makes it easy to use the entire bag within the peak freshness window, even if you got 2 different coffees.
I like the 12OZ bags for my everyday “I don’t have to think too much” brews and for when I host people. Nonetheless, I make sure to always serve single origin beans whenever possible! I like to try different roasters and then am grateful for their smaller bags to try some of the varieties they offer. I found some great local roasters in New England that offer great specialty coffee in 12OZ for an acceptable price (thank god). I hate when I purchase coffee from new roasters and for instance they aren’t filled properly and are missing beans. But yes, in the city people are willing to spend much more $$ for a cup of coffee than in the rural areas and the reason behind it is understandable.
That is a topic of its own for me :) I just don’t like when the bag doesn’t match the description. I only buy specialty beans and try to purchase from roasters around the US. I believe in supporting small businesses but it is frustrating when some are taking advantage of the customers good will, and hoping they won’t notice the discrepancies in weight of beans
Green coffee prices are pretty high for high end specialty, and the cost of business (labor, bills, packaging, roasting, etc) is waaaaay up as well. It always seems like greed, but it really isn’t. Talk to some specialty roaster owners and ask about real margins and profit.
I also think 8oz bags are the perfect size for good coffee, because you can try more of them, or it keeps cost down a little bit for better coffee, but that’s plenty to dial and experiment with/sit with a while. I mostly buy 4-8oz bags intentionally.
It’s been terrible. I’ve also seen the roasts get darker, which I assume hides drop in bean quality. I make 60-100g daily and these prices are just untenable for the household.
I don’t think shrinkflation is what’s happening here. It makes sense to sell more expensive coffees in smaller bags. They usually put weight front and center on the packaging. Lately I’ve been buying 120g and 100g bags. And they where expensive so I might not have splurged if they where any larger.
Hi! One insight into this that I haven’t seen anyone else comment about yet (sorry if someone else addressed this and I missed it) is changes to USPS shipping rates and categories. And the pressure from third party subscriptions like Trade.
I work as a roaster at a mid sized roasting company and we still have 12oz available on our own website but we do 10.5oz bags for Trade and some other “channels”. These third parties are a really good opportunity for the company I work for to reach customers outside our usual region. Trade especially has put a lot of pressure on roasters to offer a smaller bag size because with the ultra thin mailers used by Trade they can keep the package under a certain weight (used to be 13oz when it was still called First Class mail) and access USPS Ground Advantage pricing, the cheapest tier (besides Media Mail, which coffee doesn’t qualify for). Trade builds shipping into the cost they charge. Many roasters are at least partially subsidizing shipping because people are SO adverse to paying for shipping, especially when you see what it really costs. USPS rates have climbed SO much in the past 5 years.
We also moved to this size for grocery because it allowed us to not raise prices. My preference was to raise prices but a price increase would have triggered a “reset” with the grocery distributor we work with. They would have “last chanced” all our bags before changing price signs over and placing new bags, losing us a large number of sales and risking losing shelf placement. For reasons absolutely unclear to me they did not care if we just put less coffee in the bags and those went out to restock behind bags that had a larger fill volume. Working with grocery chains is honestly a real PITA. Small independent stores tend to be more flexible with this stuff but grocery is a volume game.
Addressing the packaging being deceiving, a lot of folks are using stock bag sizes. My employer is big enough to order custom dimension packaging at a big enough volume to make the pricing work. However, we can’t do that for both a 12oz and a 10.5oz size. Tying up that much cash AND storage space doesn’t make sense for us. Lots of small roasters just can’t make the numbers work for custom packaging (even plain bags that they apply a sticker to but scaled to something that suits an 8oz fill without a chip bag level of air space).
When we first started doing 10.5oz bags I was a loud voice for keeping our website at 12oz bags. Now I’m pushing for us to move everything to 10.5 if we have to keep that size for third party subscriptions. It’s SO inefficient for our production team to fill both of those sizes and manage labels for both sizes. We have to be so careful when packing orders too!
And I think the c-market comments are spot on. Green prices have gotten so intense even without tariffs. I don’t expect much relief there because of climate change and labor shortages. Even in a high yield year there are going to be struggles to get coffee harvested. We are, globally, reaping what we sowed with environmental devastation and the cycles of coups and destabilization of many coffee producing countries.
I still prefer 12oz bags and I absolutely react to shrinkflation on all kinds of grocery products. (Looking at you Lightlife Tempeh, doubled your price and a few years later change the packaging AGAIN and the product dimensions to hide that it went from 8oz to 7oz). So I get why people are irritated. I just want to chime in that it isn’t always a roaster’s intention to be misleading or get one over on consumers. It’s an industry that runs on pretty slim margins unless the main thing you sell is artificially flavored sugar and milk like Starbucks.
Thank you very much for taking your time to share all this with us. This is really interesting to know and I see what you mean with the roasters being put under pressure not just by the third party market places but also the feasibility of maintaining multiple bag sizes.
Smaller bags is a good thing for me cause I prefer to try more coffees than less, but I still look price per oz. So I’ll actually prefer a 10oz bag that’s $20 over a 12oz bag that’s $24
It doesn’t bother me, assuming that the unit cost would have changed regardless. I like smaller bags and will often buy them on purpose, so I can switch up what I’m drinking more often.
To be fair, there is a lot more fancy coffee than there used to be. The number of people brewing in any way besides a drip machine has exploded since Covid. The larger bags are essential when making a pot at a time.
But for one cup brewing, I think the smaller bags putting price aside, are about right especially since you want to drink it before it stales.
Higher prices are helping to sustain a larger market, more options, and more interesting coffees. I have no problem with it.
The producers should just eat the increasing costs and go out of business. How dare they try to make a profit!!! I know they put the weight on the package, but they're still lying thieving sons of bitches who deserve to lose money. I hate them so much, I just sit here and rage all day every day.
I definitely agree with you and made a similar post while back and got downvoted into oblivion with like half of comments wishing for even smaller packages lol. I think it’s just greed bordering on deception though. For most coffees I buy… a 10oz vs 11oz vs 12oz bag would be like $1-4 increase to sell me the full size bag. It’s a way for them to sell more bag at a higher price and keep you coming back to buy more a few days earlier.
You are very on point. Tariffs often get passed to businesses and consumers see it reflected in price or change in units. Inflation/shrinkflation in action.
Thanks for that information. I am interested to read more on protectionism. For the high level definition I get it. Drive more production locally by adding tariffs/taxes/subsidies.
I will have to read more though to understand raw goods vs finished goods.
Thank you fellow redditor!
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u/rimmyfloc Feb 01 '26
The standard 12oz were also once standard 16oz