In 2021, Nick Torres bought a used coffee roaster and rented a 600-square-foot warehouse in Portland, Oregon. He named his company Daybreak Roast. Within six months he realized that his biggest expense was not green beans or electricity. It was the paper bags he used to ship wholesale coffee to cafes.
Nick had been buying 50-pound multiwall kraft bags with inner liners. Each bag cost $2.75 wholesale. They held one shipment and then went to the landfill. He was spending roughly $400 a month on bags that customers threw away. Then a friend who ran a bakery told him about reusable shipping sacks from Redsack. Nick ordered a few, tested them with one cafe, and never looked back.
The hidden cost of one-use packaging
Most small food producers think of packaging as a fixed cost. You buy boxes, bags, or labels and you move on. But when you add up the per-unit price, the disposal cost for your customer, and the environmental guilt, single-use packaging is rarely cheap. Nick calculated that his paper bags cost him $0.055 per pound of coffee shipped. That does not count storage space or the time it took to flatten and discard the empties. He also learned that some cafes paid extra to recycle the bags through a local program.
Reusable sacks change that math. You pay more upfront, but the bag can be used dozens of times. The key is getting the bag back. Nick designed a simple system: he printed a return label on the sack and asked the cafe to toss the empty sack into a box of outgoing mail once a week. The cafe saved money on waste disposal. Nick paid postage, which was less than the cost of a new bag.
What the switch looked like in practice
Nick started with 20 sacks from Redsack. He sent 10 to his biggest customer, a cafe that ordered 150 pounds every two weeks. The cafe kept two sacks at the shop and returned the rest. After three months, Nick had received all 20 sacks back at least twice. No tears, no lost bags. He ordered another 30.
The sacks are made of woven polypropylene with a seam that holds 50 pounds of beans. They have a fabric label where Nick writes the cafe name and roast date with a marker. He washes them every few months in a front-load washer. The material dries fast and does not trap oils from the beans.
One surprise was that customers liked the sacks. Cafe owners told their customers that the coffee arrived in a reusable bag. That small detail built trust. People remember a business that thinks about waste.
The numbers after two years
Nick now uses 120 sacks for his 18 wholesale accounts. He has bought exactly 120 sacks and has not replaced any for damage. He still buys paper bags for a few out-of-state shipments, but 80 percent of his coffee moves in reusables. His packaging cost per shipment dropped from $2.75 to $0.18 when amortized over 30 uses per sack. He saves about $3,800 a year. The upfront investment of $540 was paid back in less than two months.
He also reduced his waste. In 2023, he sent roughly 11,000 pounds of coffee in reusable sacks. That replaced 220 paper bags. He estimates that kept about 440 pounds of paper and liner material out of the landfill.
Common concerns about switching to reusables
Other roasters ask Nick about logistics. He shares three honest answers.
- Returns slow down at first. You need a system, not trust. Give customers a prepaid label and a clear instruction card.
- Sacks do not work for every product. Oily beans or ground coffee can stain the fabric and attract insects. Nick only uses sacks for whole beans shipped within a two-week window.
- Lost sacks happen, but rarely. Nick lost two sacks in two years. One cafe owner moved and forgot to return the last three sacks. Nick counted that as a marketing cost.
- Washing is easy but necessary. Nick washes every sack after three uses to keep them clean and odor-free. He uses a cold cycle and no fabric softener.
- Hardware matters. The drawstring closure on Redsack sacks is durable. Nick broke one cord and replaced it with a piece of paracord. That was his only repair.
What other small businesses can learn from this
Nick did not try to solve global waste. He solved a specific expense. He picked one product and one customer to test the system. He did not overthink the design. He bought standard 50-pound sacks and used a Sharpie. He made the return process simple for his customers. And he tracked the numbers.
The same approach works for bakeries that ship flour, for soap makers who buy bulk oils, and for hardware stores that sell fasteners by the pound. The bag itself is not the revolution. The system of reuse is. If you are a small producer buying disposable bags every month, ask yourself what happens if you buy a set of reusables and never buy a bag again.