Coffee bean packaging – Science of proper coffee storage

If you’re shelling out for decent coffee beans, you want to keep them fresh right down to the last bean. Correct storage is a vital part of the ritual of coffee making.

If you store your beans right, you’ll benefit from gourmet coffee on hand any time you want it.

Great coffee means taking care of every step of the coffee making process. That includes storage of your coffee beans to maximize the taste experience of your brew.

So, let’s dive in so you can discover how to keep your beans at their best.

Coffee bean packaging

As with most food, you pack coffee beans for various reasons. The most obvious reason is that packaging is a convenient way to transport your beans. It ensures that beans don’t get lost along the way and that it doesn’t get dusty or dirty during transport and while sittig on shelves.

But, the packaging can also play a very important role in keeping these (ground) beans nice and fresh!

Packaging depends on our usage

Of course, you can package coffee beans in simple paper bags. And where this may work perfectly fine for beans you’ll be using within a few weeks, it’s not great for beans that you need to keep fresh for weeks or months at a time. As a result, which packaging you’ll choose or see being used for beans and ground coffee depends on the duration of the storage, whether it needs to undergo harsh transport conditions and what freshness and quality requirements you have!

Requirements of coffee bean packaging

For a pack to be suitable for coffee beans, there are a few considerations to take into account: keeping the flavour in, letting the gas out and keeping the oxygen out.

Types of coffee bean packaging

Knowing this (and your use case scenario) you can start looking at suitable packaging. This approach by the way isn’t unique to coffee. You can do it for any food or drink. Step 1: determine how your product needs to be protected. Second, determine how and when your product will be used.

Within the coffee bean world, there are the following most common types of packaging:

Airtight packaging (e.g. a plastic bag)

Paper bag

Airtight pack, with a one-way valve (allowing gases to escape).

So which pack is best? There is no one best method, but there are best methods for several most common use cases!

Buy it and use it – Paper

If you buy or make coffee that will be used within as little as a few weeks or days, there is no need to try and use special packaging to prolong shelf life. Instead, if you buy the coffee shortly after roasting, a paper bag will serve you just fine. The beans can degas without any issues and not enough time passes for the flavours to get lost or the oxygen to do its work in oxidatio.

Optimal freshness – Airtight + one-way valve

If you need to store your coffee beans for a longer period of time, a pack with a one-way vale is the way to go. This pack allows you to pack the beans quite quickly after you’ve roasted them. That way, you’re able to keep a lot of that flavour within and protect them from oxygen.

A major disadvantage is the recyclability of these packages, which is noticeably worse than that of just a paper bag.

If you don’t want to or can’t use the one-way valve but want a longer shelf life than the paper bag, a ‘regular’ closed bag is fine. However, BioPack have solved these problems very well. We can provide fully degradable or recyclable coffee beans packaging. A variety of customized options can meet your requirements. Contact us for more information!