The day everything else stops
Subscriptions renew on the first of the month, or every other Tuesday, and on dispatch day the roastery turns into a packing line. Someone has printed the orders. Someone else is weighing 250 gram bags off a tub of the coffee of the month. A third person is printing postage labels one at a time and working out which letterbox box fits which order, while the phone rings with a café asking about tomorrow's delivery.
By late afternoon the parcels are stacked by the door for collection, and there are always a handful where the label does not match the box, or the grind says espresso and the bag says cafetiere.
Why it takes all day
The work is done parcel by parcel, but most parcels are identical. Hundreds of subscribers might be on the same coffee in two or three grinds and two bag sizes. The ordering system shows them as individual orders because that is how they were created, so the team works through them one by one instead of as a handful of production runs.
- Orders are packed in the order they appear, not grouped by what is inside.
- Grind and bag size are read off each order rather than counted up front.
- Postage labels are printed separately from the packing list.
- Address problems and skipped deliveries are found halfway through.
- Shipped status is updated order by order, or forgotten.
The cost of a slow dispatch
Dispatch day costs a day of your team, most of it spent on reading screens rather than packing. It also costs freshness: if roasting finishes on Monday and packing drags into Tuesday, subscribers get older coffee than you intended. Mistakes create their own work, with replacement bags, postage twice and apology emails. And while everyone packs, wholesale orders and the shop get less attention than they need.
What we build for dispatch
- The day's renewals are pulled from your subscription app, whether that is Recharge, a WooCommerce subscription plugin or something else, after skips and pauses have been applied.
- Exceptions come first: addresses the courier will not accept, orders with an unusual grind, gift messages and customers on hold go to a short list to resolve before anyone packs.
- The remaining orders are grouped into packing runs by coffee, grind and bag size, with a count for each run.
- Bags are weighed and labelled per run, so the grinder is set once for each grind rather than changed all day.
- Postage labels print in the same order as the packing runs, using your courier's API or a tool such as Royal Mail Click and Drop, so the box and the label meet on the bench.
- When the run is scanned out, every order in it is marked shipped and the tracking email goes to the customer.
| Task | Parcel by parcel | Grouped into runs |
|---|---|---|
| Grinding | Grinder changed per order | Set once per grind |
| Weighing bags | One order at a time | One count per run |
| Labels | Printed one by one | Printed in packing order |
| Problems | Found mid pack | Resolved before packing |
| Shipped status | Updated manually | Marked in one step |
After the change
Dispatch starts with a sheet that says, for example, how many 250 gram bags of this month's coffee are needed in each grind, and a pile of labels already in order. Packing becomes repetitive in the good sense. Exceptions are dealt with by one person at a desk rather than by whoever happens to find them. The day ends earlier, and there is time left for the wholesale side.
Does your dispatch day look like this?
- Most of the team packs subscriptions for a whole day or more.
- Grind mix ups and wrong labels come back as complaints.
- Postage labels are printed one order at a time.
- Skipped or paused subscriptions are sometimes still sent.
- Wholesale and shop work stalls on dispatch day.