08/10/2026
Now until the end of August, 20% of online coffee sales will be donated to Las Americas IAC. Their work is important, necessary, and, we can only imagine, difficult. That’s enough for us to want to donate, but read on if you’re interested in our perspective. Please visit mercadosinnombre.com to order!
Every year at around this time, we’re receiving new harvests of Mexican coffee. Each time presents new problems relating to pricing, importing, shipping, and receiving goods from Mexico, and we get to learn more about the incredibly nuanced world we live in.
At the beginning of the year, we updated our packaging to these rad food cans, partially as a symbol of this nuanced world of trade and commerce. Our coffee now comes in simple aluminum food cans with easy pull tab tops and plastic lids for resealing the beans after opening. The thin, paper labels wrapped around the cans are distinctive for each coffee, and identify origin, producer, and taste characteristics. We like the simplicity of the form itself, but we also like that, at its core, it is a symbol of commodity: cans are humble, plain, and familiar. They speak to consumerism and mass production, things we believe are antithetical to the realities of growing coffee. This idea of commodity and perpetual availability, contrasted with the quality and scarcity of specialty coffee beans that we receive and roast, is amusingly paradoxical. The design is meant to be an affront to the effects of NAFTA, in a cheeky, ironic way that gets to benefit from the act itself.
We’re aware of our position of privilege as a company in this city and in this country, and want to donate to an organization like Las Americas that understands and works throughout the complex porosity of la frontera day in and day out (btw: “la frontera” is way cooler AND truer than “border”. It inspires possibilities— a frontier of opportunity and dreams— as opposed to a non-existent hard edge and end).
📸: Dimitri Staszewski
