What forty roasteries taught us about their own numbers

Before writing much of this platform we spent a long time standing in roasteries, mostly saying nothing. The pattern that emerged was not about roasting. Roasters are good at roasting. It was about everything that happens in the ninety minutes either side of the roast.

One: there is always a spreadsheet nobody owns

Every roastery has one. Green stock, usually. It was started by someone who has since changed roles, it has three tabs that are no longer used, and one formula that everyone is slightly afraid of. It is nobody's job to maintain it and it is load-bearing.

Two: shrinkage is measured and not trusted

Almost everyone records charge and drop weight. Almost nobody uses the resulting number for anything, because they know the scale is inconsistent, the tare is sometimes wrong, and nobody has checked whether the figure includes the chaff. So a real measurement gets taken every batch and then quietly ignored, and cost per pound is estimated instead.

Three: the same fact is entered three times

A wholesale order arrives. It is written on a whiteboard for the floor, typed into a spreadsheet for production planning, and typed again into accounting software for the invoice. Three chances to be wrong, and when the three disagree the whiteboard usually wins because the coffee has already shipped.

Four: one person is the integration

There is a person who knows which lot went into which blend, why that customer gets a different price, and what happened the last time this coffee was roasted dark. That knowledge is real, valuable, and stored in exactly one place. Every roastery we visited had this person. None of them had a plan for them being away.

Five: nobody asks the question they would find useful

We asked people what they would want to know if it were free to ask. The answers were consistently things the data could already have told them: which coffees actually make money, whether the Tuesday roaster and the Thursday roaster get different yields, how much green is sitting still. Nobody asked because the answer would have taken a day to assemble, so the question stopped being asked, and then stopped being thought.

That last one is the reason this platform exists in the shape it does. Not because roasteries need more software. Because they already have the numbers, and the cost of asking anything of them is too high.