Six ways to order two kilos of espresso
One café manager sends a WhatsApp to the owner's personal phone: "same as usual pls plus a bag of decaf". Another texts the delivery driver. A third replies to an old invoice email with "can we get 6kg this week". The new café down the road uses the order form on your website, and the hotel sends a purchase order PDF from their buying system.
All of it has to end up on the roast plan by the cut off. Most weeks it does. Some weeks a message gets read on a phone, mentally noted, and forgotten, and on Thursday a café rings to ask where their coffee is.
Cafés will not change how they order
The tempting fix is to make every café use a trade portal. Some will. Many will not, because the person ordering is a barista between customers, and messaging the person they know is easier than logging in. The problem is not the channels. It is that each channel lands on a different device, owned by a different person, with no shared list and no record that an order was seen and entered.
- Orders land on personal phones and are invisible to the rest of the team.
- "Same as usual" relies on someone remembering what usual is.
- Nothing confirms back to the café that the order was received.
- Orders are rekeyed into the invoicing system from memory.
What a missed order does
A café that runs out of your espresso on a Saturday morning either buys from someone else or serves a different coffee under your sign. Either way it chips at the account. Missed orders also mean emergency roasts and extra deliveries, and the goodwill cost falls on whoever drives the van. Orders that are entered twice, or from memory with the wrong quantity, show up later as invoice disputes.
The order queue we build
- A WhatsApp Business number and a dedicated order email address are connected to the queue, alongside your website form and any trade portal you already have.
- Each message is matched to a café account by phone number or email address.
- A language model reads the message and drafts an order against that café's product list and usual order, so "same as usual plus decaf" becomes actual lines.
- Anything uncertain, such as a coffee the café has never ordered or a quantity that looks unusual, is held for a person to confirm.
- Once confirmed, the café gets an automatic reply with what was booked and the delivery day.
- Confirmed orders flow into the roast plan and the delivery list, and into Xero or your accounts package as a draft invoice.
| Channel | Today | With the queue |
|---|---|---|
| Owner's personal phone | Business number read into the queue | |
| Mixed into the main inbox | Order address, parsed to a draft | |
| Text to the driver | Relayed later, if at all | Driver forwards to the queue number |
| Purchase order PDF | Retyped | Read and matched to the account |
| Web form | Separate email | Lands in the same queue |
The staff who used to take orders on their own phones can still chat to cafés. The order just goes through a number the whole team can see.
What the week looks like
Every order sits in one list with its status: received, confirmed, roasted, delivered, invoiced. The cut off for the roast plan is real, because you can see what has arrived by then. Cafés get a confirmation, which on its own cuts down the "did you get my order" calls. And when the owner is on holiday, orders no longer depend on their phone.
Recognise any of these?
- Wholesale orders arrive on personal phones.
- A café has rung to chase an order that was never entered.
- Someone has to know what "the usual" means for each café.
- Orders are typed into invoicing after delivery, from memory.
- You have thought about a trade portal but know half the cafés will not use it.