A coffee a day to keep the grumpy away

For Father’s Day last year I was asked to find some ‘greener’ gifts for the children at school to buy. I don’t know about everyone else but I do find men so much harder to buy gifts for than women, something that they would actually want and not just a nice gesture.

My ideas for Father’s Day were a mix of soaps, hankies, gardening and DIY gifts and a *lot* of coffee. The geeky side of me that has an engineering degree in product performance was rather excited by some packaging that I saw advertised. Percol is a fair trade brand that was also marketing itself as being plastic free with the strap line of ‘coffee on a mission’. I’ve always had a keen eye on packaging and a long time ago now I wrote my dissertation on sustainable packaging for ready meals before it was even something people were concerned about.

The use of plastic packaging is a hot topic right now, especially for something like coffee which is often made of a laminated pouch so that it keeps its freshness. This can only be recycled where facilities exist and only have a limited reuse capability like recycled carpet tiles…..whoever wants to buy them?

I was so excited to see something like coffee that is eliminating this plastic waste with an innovative solution.

Percol packs are made from completely natural substances like plant fibres and eucalyptus wood pulp or paper pulp. The packaging is completely compostable from home. More companies need to do this for the future generations to understand that this is much better for the environment.

With Father’s Day looming, I contacted the marketing company for Percol, explaining the social enterprise I was trying to make more ‘green’ with the pop-up stall and they agreed to send me a large quantity of their plastic-free packaged coffee for free! I was so hugely grateful as money raised went straight back to the school and helped to promote this eco approach to food packaging.

The stall was a huge success with the children buying a bag of lovey coffee, although one child asked if we sold wine as he thought his dad would prefer that! Kids are so honest! We wrote little notes on each bag to explain why it was so good to chose this packaging. There were lots of happy dads and it certainly kept the grumpy away.