This is not a marketing brochure. It is a communication packet — a working tool for roasters who buy our coffee and want to tell its story with the precision, honesty, and warmth it was grown with. The first ten chapters are how to post. The last three are how to look. Use it freely. Adapt it. Make it yours.
Read it linearly. Or jump to what you need. Producer Cards and Caption Templates are designed to be copied — directly into your post, your reel, your newsletter.
You bought a green lot from us. Somewhere in your roastery, a bag of GrainPro is sitting at 10–11% moisture, water activity under 0.60 Aw, waiting for your profile. That bag carries names. Ashok in Karnataka. Rene in Santa Barbara. Cristian and Greivan in Naranjo. Claudia in Dipilto. Jhon in Chirripó. Edgar, Ricardo, Rebeca in Pérez Zeledón.
Most coffee gets stripped of those names by the time it reaches a customer. Replaced with tasting notes. Replaced with vague gestures toward "direct trade." Replaced with nothing.
We built this packet because the producers we work with deserve to be visible in the cafés and roasteries that pour their coffee. And because you — the roaster — deserve language that is honest, specific, and worth repeating.
Nothing here is mandatory. Take what serves you. Edit freely. But please: do not turn this coffee into a product story. It is a person's harvest.
Excerpted from our Responsibility Report 2024–2026. Full report available at changeoftone.coffee.
Every sentence you write about this coffee should pass through at least one of these four lenses. If it does not — rewrite it.
FOB. Farm gate. Ex-warehouse. Currency exchange. Premiums. Logistics challenges. If you cannot explain where the money goes, you cannot speak about ethics.
Premiums must translate into something real at origin. Drying beds in Honduras. Stainless steel tanks in India. Micro-mills in Costa Rica. Name the outcome.
Clean washed coffees are the hardest to produce well. Anaerobic, carbonic, yeast-inoculated experiments are explored — never to chase trend, only to learn.
Same producer. Multiple lots. Year after year. A washed for espresso, an anaerobic for filter, a honey for seasonal release. That is the story worth telling.
Short sentences. Deliberate pauses. Technical when it matters. Warm when warmth is earned. Never inflated. Never salesy. Never speaking for the producer — speaking with them, or stepping aside.
The phrases on the right are not wrong. They are just empty. They say nothing a competitor could not also say. Specificity is the brand.
Before you write, ask which drive this content serves. The answer should be obvious. If a post hits two — better. If a post hits all three — that is the post we would screenshot and send to our producers.
Relationship-driven content centres a name, a place, and time. It assumes the audience cares who grew the coffee — and if they don't, it gently teaches them to.
The unit of measure here is years. Not harvests. Not lots. Years. Because that is what a real relationship looks like in this industry — surviving multiple bad harvests, currency swings, equipment failures, a global pandemic, a leaf rust outbreak. Surviving all of it and still arriving at the next harvest together.
Transparency-driven content shows your customers what you actually paid — and what that paid for. It dismantles the assumption that "specialty" is a marketing label. It is a price structure.
The hardest part of this drive is resisting performativity. Numbers without context are PR. Numbers with context are evidence.
Commitment-driven content shows what staying looks like. What forward contracting actually means. What a premium turned into, once it reached the farm. What was built. What is being built.
This is the rarest type of content in coffee marketing — because it requires you to talk about what happened before the bag arrived. Before the launch. Before there was a cupping note.
Each card below contains the essential facts and a ready-to-post caption. Copy them directly. Adapt the voice to fit your own. But please — keep the names, the elevations, and the years. Those are not decoration.
Rene farms at the highest elevation of La Maravilla farm — a plot received from his grandfather, who settled these mountains before there were roads. The variety is Parainema, a Sarchimor hybrid developed by IHCAFE: rust-resistant, high-yielding, distinctive in the cup.
In 2018 we co-sponsored the construction of a new drying facility at Las Huellas — a rail-system parabolic dryer with optimal airflow design. The investment was tied to a forward contract. Not charity. A structured commitment. Eight harvests later, his Parainema is one of Santa Barbara's most consistent profiles: plum, red grape, dark chocolate, walnut.
Ratnagiri is fully vertically integrated. Stainless steel anaerobic tanks (the first in India, built in 2019). Yeast-inoculated fermentations. Ventilated greenhouses for drying. A dry mill on-site for defect sorting, screen sizing, density separation. 170+ microlot experiments since 2018. The varieties: Cauvery, Catuai, Chandragiri, SLN9, Kent.
On Ratnagiri lots, farm gate equals FOB. There is no export margin retained between producer and export. Mahesh, the farm manager — whose children's education and health insurance Ratnagiri has been financing for years — oversees processing with a precision that shows in the cup.
For four decades the Salazar family sold their coffee to local cooperatives. In 2018, they decided to step out of that system. We found them on a blind cupping table. The SL28 and Caturra were among the most aromatic we had ever tasted from West Valley.
After Cup of Excellence success, Cristian invested in a dedicated micro-mill — Beneficio San Cristóbal. Herbicide-free operation. Weed control by mulching. In 2022, the brothers renamed the operation to honour their father, Don Danilo Salazar Arias. Now all three brothers grow under one name: Familia Salazar — Los Cipreses.
Claudia built El Árbol in 2015. Maracaturra, Gesha, SL28, Java. 14 full-time workers. Moving toward fully organic. Farm gate equals FOB on her lots — no exporter margin.
The carbonic maceration infrastructure at El Árbol is shared with neighbouring producers across Dipilto. An act of genuine community building that is rare in this industry. Claudia is one of Damian's mentors — alongside Tim Willems, a co-founder of the project and one of the most generous teachers we know.
Jhon farms at 1,800–1,950 masl in Chirripó — among the highest farms in our portfolio. In 2024 he placed second in the honeys & naturals category of Costa Rica's Cup of Excellence, scoring 92 points. The pre-dried Gesha protocol he developed is now influencing other producers across the Brunca region.
The peaberry blend in our 2024 portfolio came directly from his hands — natural processed, slow-dried, sorted three times before export. Farm gate $4.00/lb, FOB $5.00, ex-warehouse $6.21 to Seaforth, BC. A young producer building something exceptional, fast.
Edgar, Ricardo, and Rebeca run Orígenes in Pérez Zeledón. 1,840–1,900 masl. They are reinvesting every income into a processing facility and cupping lab — a lab with a view. They also grow Hass avocados on the same land.
Ricardo and Rebeca are mentors in the formal sense — they hosted Damian repeatedly, shared meals, taught the warmth that feels like family. This is the producer relationship that taught us what a producer relationship can be.
Each template below is a skeleton, not a script. Replace the amber variables with your specifics. Trim what doesn't fit. The voice is the constraint, not the structure.
These work as Instagram stories, reels, or short-form video for any platform. Each one has a hook, a middle, an end. None of them require fancy production — they require honest material and a clear point.
Hold one bag. State the producer's name, the farm, the elevation. State how many years you have been buying. End with: "That is the story."
Camera on the bag. Speak farm gate, FOB, ex-warehouse. State what each one means in one sentence. End with the producer's name.
Show the forward contract — paper, signature, or screen. State the producer, the bag count, the agreed price. End: "Before the cherries are fully ripe."
Show a single piece of farm infrastructure — drying beds, fermentation tank, micro-mill. Name it. State the year. State which producer built it.
Whiteboard or paper. Draw the tank. Explain the fermentation. Name the producer doing it. Resist all temptation to add "experimental."
Offer sample → PSS (pre-shipment) → arrival sample. Show all three cupping spoons. Explain what each one verifies. End: "This is how we know."
Name the producer. Name the challenge — drought, rust, labour. State what changed in the cup. State that the price did not change. End: "Still here."
Two numbers on screen. Explain what each one means — commodity floor vs farm gate. State why we do not benchmark against the lower one. 20 seconds, no music.
Drone or wide shot of Orígenes' lab-in-progress. Explain what is being built. Who built it. With what money. End with the lab opening date — even if estimated.
Use them with confidence. Define them when needed. Never assume your audience knows them — but never water them down either. Precise language is how the industry stops hiding from itself.
These are the most common phrases in coffee marketing. They are not lies. They are just empty — used so often by everyone that they mean nothing. Replacing them with specifics is how this brand sounds different.
These are figures from our 2024–2026 Responsibility Report. You can quote them freely — in posts, on bag tags, in conversations with customers. Update them when we publish a new report.
When citing these numbers, you do not need to credit us — but feel free to. A simple line works: "Numbers from change of tone. Responsibility Report 2024–2026." Link to the full report if you have space. It is not a sales document. It is an accounting. We would rather your customers read it than not.
The wordmark is the brand. There is no symbol, no icon, no mascot. "change of tone." set in a single weight, with a deliberate full stop. The period is not punctuation. It is the brand.
Never set the wordmark without the trailing full stop. It is part of the mark. Always present. Never separated by a space.
Minimum clear space equal to the cap-height of the lowercase "a" on every side. Nothing intrudes. No tagline, no swirl, no decorative element.
Never capitalize "Change of Tone." Never set in all-caps in body text. The name is set in lowercase as a statement, not a convention.
Use @changeoftone.coffee on Instagram. In body copy, write change of tone. (lowercase, with the period). Never "Change of Tone" and never as a hashtag in lieu of a sentence.
Black. White. Two greys. One amber, used sparingly — to underline, to emphasize, to mark something worth pausing on. We do not chase seasonal palettes. We do not use the colors of fruit to suggest tasting notes.
A warm amber (#c8922a) appears in editorial materials — reports, mailers, marketing decks — for emphasis only. Never as a background. Never as a logo color. Think of it as a pencil mark in the margin: occasional, deliberate, never decorative.
A neutral, modernist sans-serif for everything readable. A monospaced face for technical labels, prices, dates, and stamps. Italic for emphasis — used sparingly, almost reluctantly.
A neutral grotesque. Lowercase by default. Used for headlines, body, captions. The brand is set in Satoshi VF (Variable) for digital — a variable font that gives us the entire weight axis from 300 to 900 in a single file. Helvetica Neue is the print and historical brand reference. Never set tracked-out or condensed.
Satoshi VF · Helvetica Neue
A monospace face for prices, technical labels, metadata, dates, stamps. JetBrains Mono is the digital default. Anything monospaced works — IBM Plex Mono, Fira Code, Berkeley Mono. Used to mark something measured, not described.
JetBrains Mono · IBM Plex Mono · Fira Code
Same producer.
Every harvest.
Rene Fernandez's Parainema, picked at Las Huellas. Drying facility co-sponsored 2018. Now in its eighth harvest with us.
HONDURAS · 1,380–1,450 MASL
PARAINEMA · WASHED
FOB $5.25 / LB · 2025
A customer who buys your coffee once is buying the cup. A customer who comes back is buying the story. A customer who tells someone else is buying the relationship — yours, ours, and the producer's. Treat that chain with care. It is the only marketing tool that matters in the long run.
We will keep updating this manual. We will add new producer cards as new relationships form, new templates as new conversations arise. If something is missing — write to us. If something is wrong — write to us. If you used this packet to make something we should see — please, write to us.
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