Curious-er Coffee in Your Cup
Cuckoo Pint Food and Beverage Branding & Strategy 2021
Cuckoo Pint is an ethically sourced, small batch coffee roaster - obsessed with educating about beans most underrated, underestimated, and unusual. Their mission is to educate and surprise curious coffee drinkers by providing unique and unconventional beans and blends from an online store and coffeehouses across Chattanooga, TN.
Starting as a new coffee roaster and brand, Cuckoo Pint desired an identity that instantly set them apart from others in their industry - with every visual element conveying their intense curiosity, education, and eclectic interest in coffee.
Drawing inspiration from walls of dusty encyclopedias, botanical illustrations, and bespectacled 18th century botanists, we developed the strategy, visual language, messaging, and packaging to reflect their core value - educate everyone through their ideal cup of coffee.
"The Cuckoo Pint is a plant with a cheeky appearance requiring tricky preparation. It was once used to make a drink called saloop, popular before the widespread introduction of affordable tea and coffee. Although we much prefer the complexities of current coffee harvesting (and less risk of berry-induced death), we are constantly inspired and educated by the times that came before us to pave the path to today’s great coffee."
The colors chosen for Cuckoo Pint reflect the vibrant shades you’d see in a coffee field at different stages of growth - greens evocative of the leaves and young beans, a punch of red when beans are developing on the plant, soft whites of the coffee flowers in bloom, and yellow pollen wafting from the buzzing bees.
The packaging of Cuckoo Pint's offerings needed to reflect the influence of old world reference materials, while emphasizing the flavor notes in each bag of beans. Illustrations were created reflecting the explosion of unique flavors and combinations unique to each coffee, and explanations of the flavor profile are detailed on the back.
Illustrations by Arielle Stroman
