Every pouch of Crush & Cane that goes out the door gets a batch number stamped on it. Batch 001 was the first run we ever packed. If you've got a pouch in your cupboard right now, it'll tell you which one it came from — a small detail, but one we've never wanted to lose as we've grown, because it's a reminder that a person, not a machine on a production line somewhere, packed the exact pouch in your hand.
Here's why that's mattered to us from day one, and why we've kept doing it the slower way.
What "hand-packed" actually means
It means what it sounds like: no automated filling lines, no outsourced co-packer running our recipe through a machine built for a different product entirely. Each batch is mixed, weighed, and sealed by hand, in London, in quantities small enough that one person can genuinely oversee the whole thing from start to finish. It's slower than the alternative. It's also the only way we've found to guarantee that what's in a Midnight Mocha pouch from Batch 003 tastes exactly like what was in Batch 001 — because the same small team is checking every batch by hand, not trusting a machine's calibration to hold steady over thousands of runs.
Why we haven't scaled it up (yet)
The honest answer is that automating this process would mean compromising on something — usually the ratio of real ingredient to sugar, because machine-friendly recipes tend to favour consistency of flow over intensity of flavour. Real bourbon vanilla, real strawberry, real cocoa and coffee — these aren't always easy things to mix evenly at speed. We'd rather stay small and get it right than get big and get it close enough.
There's also a simpler reason: we like knowing exactly where every pouch came from. When a batch is packed by three people in a room rather than a facility we've never set foot in, quality control isn't a spreadsheet, it's a conversation that happens in real time, while the sugar's still being weighed.
What London has to do with it
We're a London brand because that's where we started and where we still are — no bigger claim than that. But being based here does mean short supply chains for ingredients that need to arrive fresh, and it means every pouch that leaves our workshop has a genuinely short journey to a UK doorstep, rather than sitting in transit for weeks before it reaches you.
What this means for you, practically
It means batch numbers that mean something, rather than being decorative. It means if something's ever off with a pouch, we can trace it back to the exact batch and the exact day it was made, and fix it properly rather than guessing. And it means every pouch you buy was, quite literally, packed by hand by someone who cares whether it tastes right — because at our size, there's nowhere else for that care to hide.
We know "hand-packed" gets used as a marketing phrase a lot. We'd rather you didn't take our word for it — check the batch number on your next pouch, and know that it's not there for decoration.
Explore the range: Dirty Vanilla · Juicy Strawberry · Midnight Mocha
