For the holiday promotion, the Seattle-based firm used Santa's famous red-and-white suit as bag graphics. Graphic Packaging (Wayne, PA) reverse prints graphics onto a 48-ga layer of polyester via gravure (see Packaging World, Aug. '96, page 17). That material is laminated to a layer of clear 48-ga polyester. These two layers are dry bond adhesive-laminated to 0.00035 aluminum foil. That structure is subsequently laminated to a 3-mil polyethylene sealant layer. The tie layer that marries the foil to the sealant layer is a PE coextrusion that creates the bond necessary to permit gas flushing and vacuum packaging. Total thickness is between 51/2 to 6 mils. The 8-oz whole bean coffee's bag includes easy-peel opening, a one-way degassing valve and an easy-peel tape on the top for reclosing. Shelf life is 90 days, though the company says the product stays fresh longer than that. Seattle's Best codes the film with a Julian date. Strictly speaking this is not a stand-up pouch, but the bag does have a bottom flat enough to stand up on store shelves and take full advantage of the Santa graphics. "We've done promotional items before, but in those instances we applied a pressure-sensitive label to a printed film bag," says Charlie Severn, retail marketing manager for Seattle's Best. "This is the first time we've actually printed a promotional bag." Graphics apparently caught the eyes of consumers in grocery stores and coffee shops nationwide. "We beat our sales projections for the promo by probably 20 percent," Severn estimates.
