Starbucks Coffee Packaging Redesign Is Deliberate In Its Updates

Intro: What lies at the heart of our Starbucks coffee packaging design?

We don’t update our core coffee packaging often. When we do, we are, accordingly, deliberate in our creative choices. For this project, we worked by three mantras: 1) Celebrate the brand, clarify the experience. 2) Tell a story with each bag. 3) Be bold and elevated like the coffee itself. By proceeding with a focused approach, we were able to express our coffee passion; advance our point of view on boldly evocative design and storytelling; and find ways to ensure a better coffee experience for customers and partners.

Design and Storytelling

Coffee packaging is a vital piece of the Starbucks brand experience, powerfully emblematic of who we are. It speaks to our coffee passion, our enduring belief in human connection, our ongoing commitments to coffee communities all over the world, our love of elevated design, and our insistence on deep storytelling. For this packaging overhaul we sought to create emotion and feeling, evoking something of the terroir of each coffee – humanity, flora, fauna, agronomy, a sense of place that transports the coffee drinker to a faraway origin. To achieve this, we used an elevated aesthetic approach, sometimes drawing on our own Starbucks Reserve work as a source of inspiration.

Shoppability and Clarity

Mindful of the need to drive business through our work, we partnered with cross-functional teams to ensure the new packaging would deliver a better experience to shoppers. Customer research indicated that our packaging in the past wasn’t as clear as it could be on key factors like flavor, roast, origin, and even the Starbucks brand itself. We embraced this challenge by proudly and consistently featuring our Siren while working within a system of design that lets customers know exactly where to look for information about the coffee inside the package.

Partner Pride

In addition to artfully expressing our brand and helping shoppers enjoy a better experience, our final barometer for this work (and all of our work) is to make our fellow Starbucks partners proud. From the store partners who work every day with these coffees to the coffee teams who source the beans, we know we’ve done our job when our work generates pride and excitement. We are inspired by these coffees and their stories every day. We hope others are, too.