Wholesale orders out of the inbox, roast days off the whiteboard
A Vancouver coffee roaster
Forty-odd cafés ordering by email, text and voicemail; roast planning on a whiteboard. Now cafés order through a portal and the week's roast plan builds itself from real orders.
01
What was broken
Orders arrived however each café preferred: email, text, a voicemail on Sunday night. Someone spent every morning retyping them into a master sheet, and the roast plan was a whiteboard translation of that sheet — erased and redrawn as orders trickled in.
Invoicing happened days after delivery, reconciled by memory against the sheet. Cafés phoned to ask where their coffee was, because there was nowhere to look.
02
What got built
- 01An ordering portal for wholesale accounts — each café sees its own products, prices and cutoff times
- 02A roast planner that rolls open orders into batches per roast day, by bean and batch size
- 03Invoices generated from fulfilled orders, not retyped from them
- 04Delivery-run sheets grouped by route, with order status cafés can check themselves
03
What changed
The morning retyping ritual is gone; orders land structured, once. The whiteboard is still on the wall, but it's back to holding cupping notes — the roast plan lives on one screen and updates itself as orders close.
The where's-my-coffee calls mostly stopped, because cafés can see their own order status. Invoicing follows fulfillment the same day instead of trailing it by most of a week.
Recognize your Monday in any of this?
Tell us what's breaking — six questions on the studio page — or start with a call.