Seed to cup · Stage 03 · Produce
COFFEE BLEND MANAGEMENT & PRODUCTION PLANNING
Keep the flagship tasting like the flagship.
Recipes are the easy part. The hard, expensive part is keeping the house blend consistent when a component lot runs out — and turning next week’s orders into a roast schedule that actually fits your machine and your rest windows. Droptime does both.
100%
Component sums, enforced
Live
Blended cost per lb
Bridge
Ratios sized to your lot
Rest-aware
Batch scheduling
HOW IT WORKS
Continuity, cost, and a feasible week
Recipes with a memory
A blend is weighted components pointing at coffees — which resolve to whichever lot is current — with pre-blend and post-blend both modeled, because they cost and deplete differently. Every material change becomes a new version with an effective date, so you can always answer “what was in the espresso blend in March?”
- Live blended landed cost per lb, recomputed as lot costs change
- Projected roasted cost using each component’s real weight-loss %
- Versioned history — continuity decisions stay auditable
Cost roll-up
House Espresso v7 · 60% Brazil / 30% Colombia / 10% Ethiopia · blended landed $4.12/lb · projected roasted $4.87/lb
Transition plans that arrive before the crisis
When inventory forecasting sees a component lot trending toward empty, Droptime proposes the changeover unprompted: ranked replacement candidates from your shelves and importer offers, a plain-language prediction of how each swap shifts the cup, and a step-down bridge schedule sized so the transition finishes exactly as the old lot empties.
- “Batches 1–3: 20% old / 10% new · Batches 4–6: 10% old / 20% new · then 0/30”
- Flavor impact in words: “caramel-orange will read brighter than the chocolate/red-apple it replaces”
- Accept, tweak, or reject — accepting writes valid, summing-to-100 blend versions
Transition proposal
Component running out in ~4 weeks. 2 candidates ranked. Bridge schedule reconciles to the 63 lbs remaining. Review →
A week you can actually roast
Wholesale orders and subscription volumes explode into required green — grossed up by real weight loss — and pack into batches sized to each machine, scheduled early enough for every coffee’s rest window and every delivery date. Infeasible weeks get flagged with the specific reason, not silently over-packed.
- “Fern Cafe’s Thursday order can’t rest 4 days and ship Thursday unless roasted by Monday”
- Say “add 40 lbs of the espresso blend for Fern Cafe by Thursday” — the plan updates, feasibly
- Roast-day work list: batch order, lots to pull, target profile, charge weight
Voice edit
“We’re down a roaster tomorrow — re-pack the week.” → 3 batches moved to Wednesday, decaf run pushed, all rest windows intact.
MORE IN THIS MODULE
The details that keep production honest
Margin you can query
Ask “what’s my margin on the decaf right now?” in chat and get a number built from landed cost, yield, and price — components shown.
Do-not-substitute flags
A single-origin flagship component can be marked untouchable — transition planning respects it and says so.
Hard validation
Percentages that don’t sum to 100 are blocked inline. Certification constraints exclude candidates that would break organic or FT claims.
Blend-aware depletion
A blend roast fans its charge weight proportionally across component lots in one transaction — inventory stays exact.
Mid-transition planning
While a bridge schedule is active, the production plan uses the ratios in effect on each roast date automatically.
Honest infeasibility
Demand over capacity gets the minimum feasible change proposed — add a day, split machines, or move a named order.
FAQ
Fair questions
It predicts from real signals — your cupping descriptors, origin and process characteristics, intake scores — and describes the likely shift in plain language. Treat it as a strong starting hypothesis to confirm at the cupping table, not a guarantee. It will never claim confidence it doesn’t have.
The plan says exactly that, and hands off to purchasing with what to look for — origin, process, profile. No plan is forced out of a thin offer list.
Each product carries its rest days. The scheduler roasts early enough that everything ships rested; when a rush order makes that impossible, you get an explicit “won’t be fully rested” warning instead of a silent violation.
Manual entry on Roastery, with recurring subscription demand rolling forward each cycle. Roastery Pro adds wholesale order sync so orders flow in from your sales channel via API.
If you want it to. Accepting writes the intermediate blend versions, and can optionally seed the production plan so the bridge batches are scheduled against the remaining old-lot weight.
The blend your customers order by name deserves this.
Watch the demo roastery run a flagship transition end to end — candidates, flavor impact, bridge ratios, and the schedule that lands it.