Coffee sachet and tea bag packaging: design basics

Quick answer

Designing coffee or tea sachets means working backwards from a tiny print area: choose the format and barrier material first, keep the legally required details legible, use colour to tell blends apart at a glance, and let the outer box carry the full story. Plan seals, tear notches and print limits before any artwork starts.

Single-serve sachets are one of the cheapest ways for a small roaster or tea blender to get into hotel rooms, subscription boxes, gift hampers and office kitchens. They are also one of the hardest things to design well. A pillow sachet might give you less face than a business card, half of which disappears into seals, and it still has to look like your brand, stay fresh for months and carry the information the law requires.

This guide covers the decisions in the order they should be made, so the artwork fits the pack rather than the other way round.

Start with the format

The format decides the print area, the machine your packer uses and the cost per unit, so it comes before any design work.

Ask your packer or printer for a template (a dieline) for the exact format before briefing a designer. A dieline shows the cut lines, seals, folds and the safe area where print will survive, and the artwork must sit on it precisely. Our guide to packaging design costs explains how format and range size affect the price of this kind of work.

Freshness and barrier materials

Coffee and tea lose aroma quickly once exposed to air, light and moisture, so the material choice is a quality decision before it is a design one. Common options:

• Foil laminates: the strongest barrier, a metallic or printed finish, but harder to recycle.
• Metallised films: good protection and lighter than foil; a common middle ground.
• Kraft paper with a barrier liner: a natural, craft look that suits speciality and organic brands, though the liner matters as much as the paper.
• Compostable or mono-material films: increasingly available; check the shelf life your product needs and what your customers can actually do with the empty sachet.

The material changes how colours print. Ink on foil looks different from ink on white film, and kraft paper dulls bright colours. Ask for a printed sample on the real material before approving a full run; our guide to why printed colours do not match the screen explains why.

What the law says must go on the pack

Coffee and tea sold prepacked are food, so UK food labelling rules apply. The government’s guide to what you must show on a food label lists the name of the food, net quantity, a best before date, any special storage conditions, an ingredients list where there is more than one ingredient, allergens, and the name and address of the business responsible.

Two details matter especially for sachets:

• Very small packs: under Article 16 of the food information regulation, where the largest surface of a pack is less than 10 square centimetres, only the name of the food, allergens, net quantity and the date mark are mandatory on the pack itself; the ingredients list can be given another way, such as on the outer box. A tea tag or tiny stick pack may fall into this group; most pillow sachets do not.
• Minimum text size: mandatory information must be printed with an x-height of at least 1.2mm, or 0.9mm where the largest surface is under 80 square centimetres. That is small, but on a sachet it still eats space quickly.

Flavoured blends need extra care. A hazelnut-flavoured coffee or a 3-in-1 sachet with milk powder carries allergens that must be emphasised in the ingredients list, for example in bold. If you nitrogen-flush coffee to keep it fresh, the GOV.UK guidance also lists a statement that the food is packaged in a protective atmosphere among the required wording. If in doubt, check with your local Trading Standards before printing thousands.

Design hierarchy on a tiny face

With so little room, every sachet needs a strict order of importance. A sensible hierarchy for most brands:

1. Brand mark: recognisable at a glance, usually the icon or a compact version rather than a long wordmark.
2. Product or blend name: “House Espresso”, “Breakfast Blend”, “Peppermint”.
3. Colour or pattern that codes the variant: so someone can grab decaf in a dim hotel room.
4. One supporting detail: strength, origin, caffeine-free or a brew instruction.
5. Mandatory information: on the back face, laid out cleanly and legibly.

Anything else, such as your story, sourcing details or tasting notes, belongs on the outer box, the website or a card in the pack. Trying to fit it on the sachet makes every element too small to read.

If your logo was designed for a large shop sign or a website header, it may not work at sachet size. Brands that sell in small formats benefit from a compact icon version of the mark. Our brand identity design service builds that kind of flexible system, with colours and type that hold up when printed very small.

Colour coding across a range

Most coffee and tea brands sell several blends, and sachets are often mixed together in a bowl or a hotel tray. Colour is the fastest way to tell them apart. A good system:

• Keeps the layout identical across every variant, so the range looks like a family.
• Changes one main colour per blend or flavour, with enough contrast between neighbours.
• Follows expectations where they help: many shoppers read darker colours as stronger roasts, greens as mint or green tea, and a distinct colour for decaf.
• Still works for people with colour vision deficiency, by pairing colour with the name and, where space allows, a simple pattern or number.

Plan the whole range at once, even if you launch with two blends. Adding a sixth colour later that clashes with the first five is a common and avoidable problem.

Practical print details that catch people out

All artwork should go to the printer as vector files with fonts outlined and the correct colour setup. Our guide to print-ready artwork covers the checks most printers apply.

The outer box does the heavy lifting

For retail, gift and subscription use, sachets usually sit inside a carton or a pouch. That outer pack is where you tell the story: origin, tasting notes, brewing guide, the full ingredients list, the barcode and your website. It also protects the sachets and gives a much larger surface for photography or illustration.

Design the box and sachets together so they read as one product. A shared colour code, the same typeface and a consistent mark placement make a carton of mixed sachets look deliberate. If you also sell bags of beans or loose tea, the same system should run across those labels; our guide to product label design covers that side.

Recycling labels and packaging rules

Customers increasingly look for recycling guidance, even on tiny packs. If space allows, add simple disposal advice; if not, put it on the outer box. The OPRL scheme provides recognised on-pack recycling labels in the UK.

Larger producers also have legal duties under extended producer responsibility for packaging. The government’s EPR guidance says obligations start for UK businesses that supplied more than 25 tonnes of packaging in a year and have an annual turnover of £1 million or more. Most small roasters and tea brands are under those thresholds, but it is worth knowing where they sit as you grow.

Hospitality, retail and subscription: different jobs

The same sachet can end up in very different places, and each one asks something different of the design.

Hotel rooms and holiday lets. The guest picks a sachet from a tray, often in low light, half awake. Clarity beats beauty here: the blend name and a colour code must be readable at a glance, and decaf must be unmistakable. A short brew instruction helps, because the kettle and cup may be unfamiliar. If you supply hotels under your own brand, the sachet is also your only advert in the room, so a simple web address on the back can earn its space.

Retail boxes and gift packs. Here the box sells and the sachets reward. Shoppers judge the carton on the shelf, then open it at home. Sachets can afford to be more decorative, as long as they match the box and each one still carries what the law requires.

Subscription and sample packs. A sachet sent as a sample is a sales tool. It should tell the recipient exactly which product it came from and how to buy more, so the blend name and the route to reorder matter more than anything decorative.

Office and café supply. Sachets are bought in bulk by someone who is not the drinker. The outer case needs clear product and quantity information for the buyer, while the sachets themselves need to look tidy in a communal kitchen.

Decide which of these matters most before briefing anyone. A design that tries to serve all four equally usually serves none of them well.

What to send your designer

A tight brief saves rounds of changes, which matters on packaging because every revision may also mean a new printed proof. Send:

• The packer’s or printer’s dieline for each format, with seal, notch and coder areas marked.
• The material and finish, and whether white ink is available.
• Your logo files in vector format and your brand colours as exact references.
• The full list of blends or flavours, with the mandatory label text for each, checked against the rules.
• Where the sachets will be sold or used, and which of the jobs above matters most.
• Two or three examples of packaging you like, and one you do not, with a sentence on why.

If your logo only exists as a low-resolution image, sort that first, because sachet print exposes every rough edge.

Test before the full run

Minimum runs for printed sachet film can be large, so a mistake is expensive. Before committing, print the artwork at actual size on paper and cut it out, then check it from arm’s length in normal light. Can you read the blend name? Can you tell decaf from the house blend in a dim room? Does anything important sit near a seal or the tear notch? Then ask for a printed proof on the real material and, if your packer offers it, a short sample run. Fill a handful, put them in a bowl with competitors’ sachets, and see whether yours are the ones people reach for.

Common mistakes with sachet design

• Shrinking the full-size packaging artwork onto a sachet, so nothing is legible.
• Using a long horizontal wordmark that becomes a thin line at sachet size.
• Choosing near-identical colours for different blends.
• Approving colours on screen without a printed proof on the real material.
• Forgetting space for the date and batch code printed on the packing line.
• Putting allergen information somewhere it can be cut by the tear notch.

Getting the design done

Bring your packer’s dieline, the list of blends and the mandatory information for each, and decide which details live on the sachet and which on the box. With that ready, the design work is straightforward. Our Packaging Design service is £99 one-off, usually turned round in 5 to 7 days, with print-ready files built to your printer’s template. Our guide to packaging design for small brands covers the wider decisions, and every price is on our pricing page.