At this point, I am not going to name names, but I will. I have ordered some beans from a new roaster to me. Having sort of enjoyed them I thought about ordering some more, but before I did, I emailed them to ask why they did not put a ‘roasted on’ label/stamp when that is the sort of info the home user likes. I received a long winded reply telling me all about food labelling requirements, part of which I paste here:
‘We did contemplate putting both dates on a bag, but this confuses many customers. (In our early days, some of our coffees just used to have the roast date on and some customers complained as they thought it was a “expired” best before date!) The compromise we came up with is to comply with the law but make it clear how this relates to the roast date.’
I quite naturally replied saying that might be as it may, but I am not talking about fulfilling legal requirements. I am talking about a firm claiming to be specialist roasters giving their customer base the type of information they require.
I placed my next order, it turned up and I have just opened it. Of the two bags, one has neither a best before date or a roasted on date. The other has no best before but a roasted on date of June 5th making it already more than 3 weeks past roast. In addition, the bag has two small holes in it.
Since the owner did not bother replying to my second email, then I can only think of two scenarios. A genuine set of mistakes or he somehow mistakenly thinks he can take the pi$$ out of me. Neither scenario is acceptable, to me anyway
