A roaster's identity that works on a 250 g bag and a 60 kg sack

The brief

Wessel Doorn had roasted coffee under his own surname for eight years, first from a garage and since 2023 from a former dairy at the foot of a dyke near Gouda. He sold to about forty cafés and through a small web shop. Two things pushed him to call us. A Belgian roaster with a very similar name had started selling in the Netherlands, and his packaging cost had crept up to €0.61 per 250 g bag because every coffee had its own printed pouch.

He wanted a name he could own, packaging that cost less and changed faster, and a shop that didn’t need a developer every time a new lot arrived.

What we did

We started with two roasting days at the dairy, timing how long it took to fill, seal, label and date a batch of 120 bags. Packing took longer than roasting. That set the main constraint for the packaging: whatever we designed had to be quicker to apply than what they had.

The name came out of a longer list of 60. Halde is an old regional word for a slope, and the roastery sits on one. It was short, easy to say in Dutch and English, and the domain and trademark were free in the Benelux.

The identity is deliberately plain:

• a heavy wordmark that still reads when it’s rubber-stamped or stencilled
• one stock pouch in three sizes (250 g, 1 kg and 5 kg) instead of a printed pouch per coffee
• a white label printed in one colour on the studio’s desktop printer, with a field for the farm, process and roast date
• six colours, one per origin region, used only on the label’s top band

For wholesale we cut a 400 mm stencil so the mark goes onto the jute sacks that carry roasted coffee to the bigger café accounts. The web shop is a small Astro site with a product template that pulls the same fields as the label, so a new lot is a label and a page made from one form.

What changed

Halde launched in May. Packaging now costs €0.50 per bag, and a new coffee goes on sale the day it is cupped, where before it waited three weeks for printed pouches. The team packs a batch of 120 in about 50 minutes, down from 70.

Online orders were up 38% in the first quarter after launch, helped by a subscription option that the old shop didn’t have. Nine cafés have started buying wholesale since May, two of them in Antwerp, where the old name would have caused the most confusion.