BODY CHARGE Coffee is Evolving
Starting this month, you’ll notice our coffee bags look slightly different.
And you’ll notice the coffee beans inside taste slightly different as well.
Over the past six months or so, we’ve been faced with change and decisions we needed to make about the direction of BODY CHARGE Coffee.
We wanted to put everything down in a blog post, so you have all the details, because an Instagram caption or an email just doesn’t cut it – we want to give an inside look at why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you’re like us, you like going deeper than surface level.
So make yourself a coffee and catch up on the latest. Let’s get into it:
PART ONE:
DIFFERENT BEAN SUPPLY
When we set out to create BODY CHARGE Coffee, we had very specific specs that the beans must meet. They must be:
- Certified Organic
- Single Origin
- High Altitude Grown
- Fairtrade Certified
- Specialty-grade
- No mycotoxins, moulds, or chemicals, confirmed by a 3rd party lab test
We were THRILLED when we found a bean from a location in the South Pacific that fit all these specs, was relatively close to home in Australia, and we loved that it was a relatively difficult bean to source due to price and availability.
THIS was our BODY CHARGE bean you know and have loved for the past couple years. It was love at first taste and we were stoked we found “our” bean, and even more stoked that our customers loved it just as much as we did!!
However.
What makes our coffee bean special – that it meets all our specs above, particularly the region it’s grown, and the fact that it is not massively available – we have learned of a slight downfall:
This coffee bean’s supply is not available now.
We’ve been working feverishly over the past several months to source another bean like our beloved OG BODY CHARGE bean – Certified Organic, Single Origin, High Altitude, Clean & No Toxins, Fairtrade Certified.
And with this search we’ve discovered something.
Instead of committing to “One Particular Bean Forever” – which has proven it’s not quite possible, due to the inherent unpredictability and volatility in supply of the coffee market – we’ve decided to expand our search radius. Not just looking close to home in the Australia-South Pacific region, but to all coffee-growing regions in the world.
Discovering small batch coffee beans from regions around the world
From now on, we will continue to offer Single Origin coffee – except now instead of keeping it a secret, we want to embrace the uniqueness of the region a particular coffee bean is grown and highlight the qualities of that bean. We’ll start putting the origin of each bean on our packaging, and when the supply is gone, it’s gone.
We’ll continually search for the next BODY CHARGE bean.
It’s not the easiest task, given our long list of specs the beans must meet, but we’re committed to finding unique, small batches of beans that meet our (arguably high) standards of quality.
Instead of wishing things could just stay the way they were, where everything was going along just fine, we are embracing this change head-on and flowing with it – and we hope you’ll join us in this journey!
We look forward to bringing you BODY CHARGE Coffee sourced from unique regions around the globe.
Same standards of quality. Different tastes and experiences.
Our quality standards will never change, you can count on that. But our BODY CHARGE beans will offer different tastes and flavours depending on the batch. A whole new experience for your mornings and your tastebuds.
PART TWO:
BODY CHARGE COFFEE ORGANIC CERTIFICATION + PACKAGING CHANGES
Starting in November, you will begin seeing labels strategically covering parts of our coffee bags.
Why will there be labels covering certain parts of the BODY CHARGE Coffee bags?
We are switching Organic certifications.
We’re currently switching from NASAA (National Association for Sustainable Agriculture Australia) to ACO (Australian Certified Organic). This means some of the logos on our bags need covered up.
Instead of buying completely new bags and discarding hundreds of existing bags (which would be super wasteful), we opted to have labels printed with the new info and apply them to the existing bags. This allows us to use up our existing supply while also making sure our packaging is compliant for sale.
[ To be completely honest, we tried to make the labels yellow to match the current bag, but they turned out to be translucent once applied. You could still see the original info underneath. Our label colour choice we were left with was basically…black. What’s less see-through than black? Absolutely nothing. So that’s what we went with. From this month on, you’ll see our BODY CHARGE Coffee bags with black labels, yellow text to reflect our change in organic certification and the new coffee beans. ]
What does this mean for the coffee beans? Is BODY CHARGE Coffee still Certified Organic?
In this interim period, our BODY CHARGE Coffee beans are “Organic,” we just aren’t allowed to label them as “Certified Organic” until our ACO Certification is complete in about 2 months.
Organic vs Certified Organic
Organic means grown and processed without the use of synthetic chemicals, fertilisers, or GMO’s. Being Certified Organic guarantees this. It involves rigorous auditing every step of the way in the supply chain, among other processes.
Why are we switching organic certifiers?
At a basic level, NASAA is dropping their affiliation which is linked to USDA Organic, meaning we can no longer use the USDA Organic logo on our packaging. Whilst we could still use the NASAA Organic logo and be certified under NASAA, in considering our longevity as a brand and the future of our organic certification we decided to switch certifiers to ACO (Australian Certified Organic).
We are not the only ones faced with this situation; there is currently a backlog of businesses switching to ACO and therefore it could take up to two months to complete the process.
In this transition we are technically not certified to an Organic Standard as we will have to undergo the ACO certification process, including audits and documentation across our whole supply chain, which we can respectfully understand.
This means our current supply of coffee beans will technically not be ‘Certified Organic’ as we are not approved with ACO yet. Does that make sense? But please note our beans are still ‘organic’ and most importantly our standards remain the same from when we first began this adventure!
WRAPPING UP
There is nothing more important to UNCHARTED than having our products Certified Organic. It’s our belief that our customers are like us and want to know and see that the products we are purchasing and consuming are Certified Organic.
Change can be uneasy, the older we get the more we tend to become creatures of habit. And right now, is the exact reason we started UNCHARTED.
The dictionary meaning of ‘uncharted’ is:
Not recorded or located on a map or plan; unknown.
As of right now this couldn’t be truer to us. Life is testing us for something greater.
So, it’s very uneasy to walk down a path we are not familiar with as this involves risk and uncertainty and makes perfect sense to retreat or curl up in a ball. (Yes, we pretty much cried when we heard the news about NASAA, and absolutely, we had thoughts of “what-if-our-customers-don’t-want-this-to-change” when we were forced to find a solution for our unavailable coffee bean supply.)
But we are not normal, we look to see what could come from this and with educated risk comes a better chance of reward, and with the unwelcoming the news, it has paid to be open to exploration. Even though we thought we found the perfect bean (Cheers to you, OG BODY CHARGE Coffee, may we meet again someday…), the reward is we’ve been able to find NEW amazing beans.
Beans that meet our standards:
- Organic (soon to be Certified Organic).
- Lab tested.
- High altitude grown.
- Single Origin.
- Specialty-grade.
- Fairtrade Certified.
What’s exciting is that we can give you new tastes and new experiences.
Thank you for being here on this journey with our small family business. We hope you come along on this new chapter of BODY CHARGE Coffee – if anything, your tastebuds will thank you!
CHEERS ☕️