Guide · updated September 2026
Green coffee inventory: how much to hold and when to reorder
Run short and you disappoint an account, which you hear about within a week. Hold too much and you are financing coffee that gets older while it waits, which nobody tells you about at all. The two mistakes cost about the same and only one of them is visible.
Start here
Three numbers, and none of them is the one on the shelf.
Green stock feels like a single figure and behaves like three. The one you can see is the least useful of them on its own.
01
The count
What is actually in the building?
Not what the last delivery note said, and not what the spreadsheet says. Nominal bag weights are 60 or 69 kg depending on origin and the bag in front of you is rarely exactly either, so a count in bags and a count in kilos answer different questions. The second one is the only one that plans a roast.
Where it drifts: Partial bags. One opened for a sample roast, one split across two blends, both still counted as whole.
02
The clock
How old is it, and when does it stop being what you bought?
Green is the only stock in the building with a quality clock running on it. Held somewhere stable it is commonly reckoned to hold for six to twelve months from arrival; heat and humidity shorten that, and sealed or vacuum packaging lengthens it. The change is gradual enough that nobody notices on any single day.
Where it drifts: A lot bought for a seasonal blend, still on the pallet in month nine, now cupping like something you would not have bought.
03
The commitment
What have you already agreed to take?
Contracted coffee is stock you own without holding, and it arrives whether or not the month went the way you planned. A roastery buying forward is running two inventories at once: the one on the floor and the one on paper, with the second one landing in lumps.
Where it drifts: A forward agreed at a cupping table, remembered by one person, and discovered by everyone else when the pallet turns up.
The options
How roasteries actually run this.
Four approaches, in the order roasteries tend to meet them. The last one is ours. The third is cheaper than ours for this job specifically, and that is said there rather than buried.
A count sheet and a spreadsheet
Free, and right for longer than we would like
Bags counted on a Tuesday, usage taken off as you roast, reorder when the number looks low. This is not a failure of discipline and it does not stop working at some published threshold. It stops working when the count and the floor disagree often enough that you stop trusting the sheet, which usually arrives before the volume does.
Right until you are counting more than about a dozen lots, or until the count is wrong more often than it is right.
General inventory or accounting software
Knows units and cost, not coffee
QuickBooks, Xero and the general inventory tools track quantities and what they cost you, which is genuinely half the problem and the half your accountant cares about. What none of them know is that the unit going out is not the unit that came in: a pound of green leaves as roughly seven-eighths of a pound of roasted, and no general system converts that for you or ties a lot to the batch that drew from it.
Fine if you want green valued correctly on the books. It will not plan a roast.
Roasting software with green attached
artisan.plus, Firescope, Cropster at Core
artisan.plus holds green purchases and stock by warehouse with every roast deducted automatically, at €50 a month for PRO or €50 a year for HOME if you are one person under 500 kg of green — cheaper than us at every volume for this job, and worth knowing before you read any further. Firescope includes inventory and green analysis. Cropster carries live green inventory from its Core plan at $109 a month, with advanced green and roasted reporting at Scale.
If green inventory is the whole problem, one of these is very likely the answer and it is not us.
One record from contract to invoice
Cropster at Advanced, and ours
Here the contract, the lot, the batch that drew from it and the order it filled are one record, so a lot's remaining weight is a consequence of roasting rather than a number somebody maintains. Cropster's green contracts and costs management is an Advanced feature or a €500 add-on; ours is in the base plan. Firescope does not describe contracts in its guide, and Flexnet publishes neither green lots nor contracts among its five areas.
Worth it for traceability and true cost per lot. Overkill if you buy spot from one importer.
Deciding
Four questions, in this order.
How long is your longest lead time?
This sets the buffer, not your usage rate. Spot from a domestic importer can be days; a forward contract or a direct relationship is months and lands all at once. Plan against the longest one you actually depend on, because that is the one that strands you.
Do you buy spot, or on contract?
Spot buying is a reordering problem and the calculator below solves most of it. Contract buying is a scheduling problem — the coffee is already yours and the question is drawdown, cash, and where it sits until you get to it. Software that only models reordering will not help with the second.
Does a roast need to name the lot it drew from?
If a wholesale account, a certification, or your own cupping record needs to trace a bag back to a lot, then lot identity has to survive the roast, and that rules out counting in totals. If nothing downstream ever asks, you can hold green as a single number per coffee and ignore half of this page.
Who counts, and how often?
Every system on this page is a record of what someone counted. A monthly count nobody has time for produces worse numbers than a weekly count that takes ten minutes, and the most expensive inventory software in the world cannot tell you about the bag that walked out on Friday.
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
- How much green coffee should a roastery hold?
- Enough to cover your longest lead time plus a buffer, measured in weeks of usage rather than in bags. If you roast through 400 lb of green a week and your importer quotes six weeks, then 2,400 lb is not your target — it is the level at which you are already late, because placing the order at that point means arriving at zero. The target is that figure plus however long the quote has actually slipped in the past, which for most roasteries is two to three weeks more than they would guess.
- How long does green coffee keep?
- Held somewhere stable and off the floor, green is commonly reckoned to hold its character for roughly six to twelve months from arrival, and sealed or vacuum packaging extends that. Heat and humidity shorten it considerably. The practical problem is not that it spoils on a particular date but that it fades gradually, so the coffee you are disappointed by in month nine tends to get blamed on the roast rather than on the calendar.
- How do I convert green weight to roasted weight?
- Multiply by roughly 0.82 to 0.88 depending on how far you take the roast; around 0.85 is the usual planning figure. Working the other way, shipping 1,000 lb of roasted coffee in a month means buying and holding closer to 1,175 lb of green. That gap is where most inventory arithmetic goes wrong, because the number you sell in and the number you buy in are never the same unit.
- Is a forward contract worth it for a small roastery?
- It secures a coffee you want and usually a better price, and it commits cash and space months ahead on a volume you are guessing at. For a roastery under a few thousand pounds a year the guess is the risk, not the price. Splitting the difference — contracting the one or two coffees your blends genuinely depend on and buying the rest spot — is what most roasteries this size end up doing, and it is a reasonable place to start rather than a compromise.
- What is shrinkage, and how much should I expect?
- The difference between what the paperwork says you have and what the scale says, before any roasting. It comes from nominal bag weights that are not exact, moisture loss in storage, sample pulls, and spillage. It is small per bag and it accumulates quietly, which is why the useful habit is not chasing every discrepancy but counting often enough to notice when the gap starts growing.
- Do I need inventory software for this?
- Not if you hold a handful of lots, buy spot, and nothing downstream asks which lot a bag came from. A count sheet answers all of it. You need software when lot identity has to survive the roast, when contracted coffee has to be tracked before it arrives, or when the question is what a lot actually cost you rather than how much of it is left. If it is only the last mile of that list, artisan.plus is cheaper than we are.
- Should I count green in kilos or in pounds?
- In whatever unit your importer invoices, and then convert once, in one place. Most of the variance roasteries find in their green records is not theft or waste; it is a 60 kg bag recorded as 132 lb in one place and 132.3 in another, compounded across a year. Pick the unit the paperwork arrives in and make everything else derive from it.