AUTOMATION FEATURE
Cropster Order to Roast and eCommerce powers effective roastery operations CROPSTER ORDER TO ROAST AND ECOMMERCE SOLUTIONS CREATE CONNECTIONS ACROSS A COFFEE ROASTING BUSINESS, FROM POINT OF SALE RIGHT THROUGH TO PRODUCTION PLANNING AND OPERATIONS.
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ccording to industry veteran Marcus Young, most coffee businesses he speaks to look very different to how they did two years ago. “Almost every coffee business – with some exceptions to the rule – fundamentally changed due to COVID. Many roasters focused on selling wholesale coffee – offering coffee in bulk five pound or two-to-three-kilogram bags – distributed to cafés and restaurants, with smaller retail orders worked around those. That changed when almost every café on the planet closed overnight,” Young tells Global Coffee Report. “The roasters that could adapt their sales and directly reach consumers were able to pivot and weather the storm. But it meant that their production processes fundamentally changed. Packaging a 2000-kilogram-roast day in two-to-three-kilogram bulk bags is much easier than packaging 1000 kilograms into 250-gram retail bags. It was important for roasters to have a system that could help them understand where those resources need to be deployed.” Coffee software solutions supplier Cropster’s Order to Roast feature captures information from coffee orders and converts them into flexible production plans. Whether the order is placed online, over the phone, or in person with a sales representative, it just needs to be entered into the system. This calculates what and how much green coffee needs to be roasted to deliver the order. After nearly 20 years in coffee working in roasting, retail cafés, and green coffee in the US and East Africa, Young joined Cropster in July to help Cropster deepen its coffee and market knowledge. He says as part of an integrated roastery solution, with inventory and quality management built in, Order to Roast saves time, improves consistency, and reduces errors and admin tasks across the business. “When I’m talking to coffee roasters about Order to Roast, I ask them how long it usually takes each production day to gather orders, plan production, and put it in a system the roasting and fulfillment departments can use. The answer is usually anywhere from 45 minutes to two
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eCommerce enables roasters to funnel all orders through one channel, which Order to Roast can use to automate production plans.
hours. That manual planning is a huge drain on human resources. The time savings Order to Roast offers, creating a production plan that just needs a quick review, are significant,” Young says. “There can be three or more single origin coffees in a blend, so when manually calculating production, you need to calculate the percentage of each coffee in each blend, how much of each needs to be roasted based on weight loss percentages, and incorporate all of that all into a roast plan. It’s also easy to
