Coffee Bags

Construction

Export coffee bags are woven from jute or sisal fibre. Jute is the more common. Both are breathable, strong in tension, and cheap — and both are food-contact materials that need to be produced to a suitable standard.

• Bags should be new for export coffee. Reused sacks carry taint and pest risk from their previous contents.
• Stitching quality determines whether a bag survives multiple handling events; burst bags at the port are a real cost.
• Bags are breathable by design. That is useful for a commodity moving quickly and a liability for one going into long storage — hence liners.

Weight conventions

The practical consequence for container planning is direct: bag weight determines how many bags a payload allows. The container loading calculator takes bag weight as an explicit input for exactly this reason.

Handling at destination

1. 160 kg is heavy. It is at the limit of safe single-person handling and most destinations use mechanical assistance or two-person lifts.
2. 230 kg presentations cost more per kilo in packaging but are materially easier for small roasteries, and reduce handling injury risk.
3. 3Stacking height matters: bags at the bottom of a tall stack compress, which affects both the bags and — over long storage — the coffee.
4. 4Palletisation simplifies destination handling but reduces the number of bags a container can hold. It is a trade-off to decide before loading, not after.

Disposal and reuse

Jute bags have an active second-hand market at destination — landscaping, packaging, craft use — and they are biodegradable. Liners are not, and are a plastic waste stream the roastery has to deal with. For buyers with packaging-waste commitments, that is a genuine consideration in choosing between lined and unlined presentations.