We hadn’t thought much about packaging suggestions for homemade food gifts until our friend David Saltman was casting about for bags to pack his home-roasted coffee beans in. We had a dwindling stash of white metal tie coffee bags we’d bought years ago by begging the coffee guy at our local gourmet store to sell us some for .10 a piece. We were sure David could buy them online, so we poked around for him. We ended up at the source we’ve used years ago for other packaging supplies: the great Paper Mart, an online store with a huge array of packaging materials. It’s where we bought the cello bags we use to pack our Homemade Chocolates for Improvising and Tapas Bar Roasted Almonds, above. We also use them to package treasures we buy in bulk like Bequet’s Caramels, and dried figs with bay leaves, dried guava slices…

Paper mart does indeed sell metal tie coffee bags, in plain white, Kraft paper and colors. We use them to sell our home dried verbena tea, and Darjeeling blends we make from teas we by at Upton Imports.  We get them in white so we can write or draw our card right on them.

white coffee tie bags

 

Paper Mart’s “Bag” section alone will set your head spinning. We love their Kraft Handle Shopping Bags, in many sizes and colors. Often they are all that is needed to “wrap a gift” along with some tissue paper stuffing. We often buy white or light colored ones so we can write a note right on them. These White/Kraft ‘Versa’ bags are pretty stylish.

kraft versa shopping bags

We always save good sheets of the corrugated cardboard that fragile things are often wrapped in. It makes a great impromptu wrapping paper…

marthastewartliving.com
marthastewartliving.com

Paper mart sells rolls of corrugated paper in a huge array of colors. Unfortunately it doesn’t come in black which would be pretty fab. But they DO have corrugated boxes in black and a nice hot red.

corrugated boxes colors

They also sell foodsafe boxes for homemade cookies, candies and cakes — and any other thing you can think to put in them. Although we usually like minimalist white, these pink ones were pretty great:

pastry boxes pink

We’ve also bought boxes like these from local pastry shops. We just assemble them and line them with sheets of parchment or waxed paper.

 

Wondering how to pack your juicy Prunes in Armagnac? Stay tuned for our round-up of cool jars…

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