Early in a coffee roasting business, it’s easy to simply receive orders, fulfill them, and ship/deliver to the client as the orders roll in—especially when you’re a one-person team. But as your volume grows, this approach quickly becomes unsustainable.
In the beginning, you can stroll into your roastery—maybe with a few queued orders placed the night before—and start prepping green coffee and the roasting plan for the day. And, if a handful of ecommerce or small wholesale orders roll in as you work, you tack them onto the schedule for the day.
However, as demand and roast volume grows and you add a few staff members to the team to assist, these “roast and fulfill as needed” processes simply won’t fly. This repetitive and unorganized approach to wholesale and ecommerce order fulfillment results in unnecessary stress and inefficiency throughout your team.
But this challenge isn’t unique to small roasting operations. Throughout our years at RoasterTools, we’ve seen many large-scale roasting businesses also take this approach and cause unwarranted pressure on the production team, ultimately leading to costly mistakes!
Operating a wholesale coffee roastery without defined order deadlines causes unnecessary chaos and expenses throughout the production process. Worst of all, these interruptions run the risk of maintaining a healthy profit as you pile on the last-minute expenses to fulfill each rush order.
Fortunately, the solution to this challenge is simple: implementing order deadlines!
An order deadline is exactly what it sounds like: a specific day/time each week when a wholesale client must submit their coffee order by.
There are two typical deadline models roasters follow:
Some roasters prefer to have a rolling deadline with a shipping/delivery offset. An example of this deadline would be:
“Orders placed by 4:00pm daily will be shipped or delivered in two business days.”
This allows orders to be placed any day of the week with an understood expectation of when the order will be received or shipped.
Other roasters assign dedicated order days and times, such as:
“Wholesale orders must be placed weekly by Monday at 4:00pm.”
This model is best for roasting operations that only roast a few times a week, or assign customers to specific production dates to best balance out production capacity throughout the week.
No matter which model you choose, when a client follows this deadline, it ensures their order is added to the production queue and fulfilled by the intended date. Order deadlines allow coffee roasters to maintain a seamless production flow and keep clients on track with their roasted coffee inventory needs each week.
Spoiler Alert: You and your clients are human. Humans get busy. Humans forget things.
Our lives in the coffee industry are complicated and having a routine ordering deadline can keep everyone—roasters and coffee shops alike—on task. With a deadline in place every week, your clients have enough lead time to get their inventory counts in order and submit their coffee order.
Asking clients to follow an ordering deadline is not unreasonable, it’s standard practice. Order deadlines exist to give all parties enough time to complete their part of the ordering process accurately and to quality expectations.
All too often, we set these internal pressures to get coffee orders roasted, packaged, and fulfilled the minute they’re placed—no matter if it’s a wholesale or ecommerce transaction. This happens primarily to smaller roasting operations, when you don’t necessarily need to have hard and fast deadlines in place and want to get orders out the door. But as your business grows this practice becomes unsustainable and places undue pressure on your roasting and fulfillment teams to churn orders out.
Managing orders this way also creates an unhealthy tension between your sales and production teams. Sales wants to please the customers and drive revenue into the business, while your production teams want to maintain a seamless workflow without disruption.
You’ll understand this conflict first hand if you’ve ever had to fire up the roaster at the end of the work day to “get this order done ASAP” for a client.
Implementing order deadlines provides benefits for all parties involved. Wholesale customers enjoy an easy and routine ordering process, while roasters can properly plan production operations to roast and fulfill orders without added stress.
Let’s explore the benefits of order deadlines for roasters and clients:
However, this seemingly efficient flow only happens when everyone involved sticks to the deadlines.
You can spend all the time in the world dissecting and solving the many inefficiencies throughout your roastery. You can even invest in roasting business technology to help you streamline several aspects of the entire roasting and fulfillment process. But all this won’t achieve your desired outcomes of efficiencies if you don’t put order deadlines in place!
Order deadlines act as a defined cutoff for your team to understand what needs to be done on any given day. Without order deadlines in place, this list of roasting and fulfillment demands will simply continue to grow and change with no end in sight.
This only leads to confusion from your roasting team when they don’t know what orders to fulfill on a specific day. After all, orders just keep coming in, so how are they defining priority? How are they batching tasks such as bagging, packaging, and labeling? Order deadlines guide your staff in creating an efficient production schedule that roasts, fulfills, and delivers coffee orders to clients on time and correctly.
The trick to making order deadlines work in your favor is both incredibly simple and incredibly difficult. You have to stand by your deadlines.
Enforcing order deadlines seems simple, right? After all, you’re only saying “No, sorry” to a client. How hard could that be…?
If you’ve ever been responsible for generating wholesale revenue, you know exactly how hard it is to say no to a client—especially when they simply forgot what day it was or had a family emergency and couldn’t get to their computer in time to place the order. Life happens, remember?
👉To resolve this complex situation, we recommend that coffee roasters implement two order deadlines: an external deadline for clients and an internal deadline for the production team.
The external deadline is the deadline you tell customers to place their order by. The internal deadline is the time that the production team agrees not to accept any additional orders after. For example, you can tell customers to place their orders by 12:00pm on Mondays. But, the production team has a “last call” deadline of 8:00am on Tuesdays.
This structure allows clients to be a little late with their orders without disrupting the entire production process. And, if clients are late, you can gently remind them of the ordering deadline while still being able to fit their order into the roasting queue.
Overall, your ordering schedule would go as follows:
(Just be careful that an internal deadline doesn't become an external deadline! It should be the exception, not the norm.)
👉Take a moment to consider what order deadline schedule would work best for your production team and clients. How can you implement both an external and internal deadline to make all parties happy?
This approach also works for ecommerce orders as well! Roasters can implement an internal deadline for each production day. Meaning if an ecommerce order is placed at 9:30am, well after the 8:00 am daily cutoff, it is fulfilled the next production day.
The structure of your production processes will also influence how you design your order deadlines.
Roasters that “roast to order” must structure their deadlines with enough time to roast, blend, package, and ship/deliver the orders to each wholesale client. This approach to roastery operations has several more steps involved from the moment an order is placed to the second it reaches the client.
On the other hand, roasters that utilize the “fulfill from inventory” approach to operations will have less steps involved for the total production process. This means that these order deadlines can have a bit of a shorter turnaround time than those that roast to order.
Even with the best of intentions, some customers are terrible at following a routine. These tricky clients may need a bit of hand holding to get their orders in on time.
Fortunately, we know a few tips that can help:
Ultimately, implementing and sticking to order deadlines relies on open and honest lines of communication between you and your clients. But once in place, these deadlines can be the missing piece to an efficient and profitable production flow inside your roastery.
Enforcing wholesale order deadlines doesn’t have to be a burden. With RoasterTools’ wholesale ordering platform, you can:
One click and your order deadlines are in place for your clients and production team to follow. Book a demo with us and see how your roastery can implement order deadlines with RoasterTools.
