Sunday night arithmetic
Monday is a roast day, so on Sunday evening the head roaster opens three tabs: Shopify for retail orders, the subscription app for the week's renewals, and the shared inbox where cafés send their orders. Retail comes in as 250 gram bags, subscriptions as bags of whatever the coffee of the month is, and the cafés order in kilos, some whole bean, some in 1 kilo bags, one in 6 kilo tubs.
The totals go on the whiteboard by coffee. Then the roaster works out how much green that means, rounds up to full batches for a 15 kilo drum, and adds a bit for the shop. If something comes in on Monday morning, the whole column gets rubbed out and redone.
The plan is really a unit conversion problem
Nobody struggles to decide what to roast. The work is in the conversion. Orders are in bags of different sizes across three systems. The roaster thinks in batches. The green stock is in kilos. Roast loss varies by coffee and by roast level, so a kilo of dark roasted espresso needs more green than a kilo of light filter. Doing that arithmetic by hand every week is where coffees get under roasted and where a batch of something nobody ordered ends up on the shelf.
When the whiteboard gets it wrong
- A late wholesale order is missed and a café waits an extra roast day.
- Batches are rounded up generously, leaving roasted coffee that goes stale.
- The roast order is set by habit rather than by what ships first.
- Only one person can build the plan, so holidays are a problem.
- Nobody can see in advance whether green stock covers the week.
How our roast planner works
- Orders are read from each source: Shopify or WooCommerce for retail, your subscription app for renewals due, and your wholesale orders, whether they come from a trade portal or are entered from emails.
- Every line is converted to roasted kilos of each coffee, using the bag sizes on your product list.
- Your roast loss per coffee and roast level turns roasted kilos into green kilos, so the plan also checks the green stock.
- Batches are proposed to fit your roaster's minimum and maximum charge, with any small top up flagged rather than silently rounded.
- The plan is laid out per roast day, ordered by dispatch deadline, so the coffees shipping first are roasted first.
- The head roaster edits the plan freely, and orders that arrive after it was built appear as additions rather than forcing a rebuild.
| Input | Where it comes from | What the planner does with it |
|---|---|---|
| Retail orders | Online shop | Bags converted to roasted kilos |
| Subscriptions | Subscription app renewals | Coffee of the month resolved to a real coffee |
| Wholesale | Trade portal or email | Kilos per café with delivery day |
| Roast loss | Your own figures | Roasted kilos converted to green |
| Roaster size | Your drum capacity | Batches sized and counted |
What roast day looks like with a plan
The plan for Monday is ready on Friday and updates itself as orders arrive over the weekend. The roaster starts with a batch list, in order, with the green lot to use for each. Anyone who knows the roaster can follow it, which means the head roaster can take a week off. Over time you also have a record of planned against actual batches, which shows where you consistently over roast and by how much stock you end up with on the shelf.
Is your roast plan on a whiteboard?
- Orders from three or more places are added up by hand each week.
- The roast plan lives in one person's head or on a board.
- You regularly have roasted coffee left that nobody ordered.
- Late wholesale orders push cafés to the next roast day.
- You do not know until roast day whether the green covers the plan.