A Coffee Roaster in Portland

This Portland coffee roaster started as a single storefront, roasting small batches and selling directly to locals and visitors. The founder had built something special — a brand that people loved and a product that local restaurants and cafes wanted to carry. The demand for wholesale was there. The infrastructure to handle it was not.

Retail orders came through the register. Wholesale orders came through a mix of emails, phone calls, text messages, and occasionally a handwritten note left on the counter by a restaurant owner who stopped by for coffee. Everything was tracked in a notebook and a patchwork of spreadsheets. When volume was low, it worked. As wholesale interest grew, it fell apart.

Orders were getting mixed up. A cafe across town would receive the wrong roast. A hotel kitchen would reorder and discover their last order had never shipped. The founder was spending her evenings reconciling orders instead of doing what she loved — roasting coffee and building her brand. She'd turned down three potential wholesale accounts in the past month alone because she simply couldn't handle more volume with her current process.

Inventory was another blind spot. She roasted in batches, but had no reliable way to know how much roasted inventory was on hand versus what was committed to orders. She'd occasionally double-sell the same batch — promising it to both a retail restock and a wholesale delivery.

We spent two days mapping the complete order flow — from the moment a wholesale customer placed an order to the moment the delivery was confirmed. We interviewed the founder, her two roasters, and the part-time employee who handled packing and shipping. We also spoke with three of her wholesale customers to understand their experience on the receiving end.

The pattern was clear: information was entering the business through five different channels and converging in one notebook. There was no single source of truth, no automation, and no visibility into what was happening at any given moment. The business didn't need more people. It needed a system.

We designed and implemented a unified order management system over five weeks:

• A centralized order portal where wholesale customers could place orders directly. No more emails, texts, or sticky notes. Each customer had a simple login where they could see the product catalog, place orders, and view their order history. The portal matched the brand — clean, simple, and welcoming.

• Automated inventory tracking that connected roasting batches to available stock. When a roast was completed, the batch was logged. The system automatically updated available inventory and deducted quantities as orders were confirmed. If a product was running low, the team knew before the orders came in — not after.

• An analytics dashboard that gave real-time visibility into the business. Which roasts were selling fastest. Which wholesale accounts were growing. What revenue looked like this month versus last. For the first time, there was data to make decisions with instead of relying on gut feeling.

The system integrated with the existing Square register for retail sales, so everything flowed into one place. Training took less than two hours for the whole team.

Within six months, the transformation was dramatic:

• 3x wholesale volume — the company went from 8 wholesale accounts to 24, confidently taking on new business because the system could handle it
• Zero missed orders — every order was tracked from placement to delivery with automatic status updates to customers
• Real-time inventory visibility — no more double-selling batches or discovering stockouts after a customer called to complain
• 5 hours/week saved on admin work — time reinvested into developing new roasts and building relationships with accounts
• Better customer experience — wholesale clients praised the ordering portal, and several said it was easier to order from this small roaster than from much larger suppliers

The founder's favorite metric was one she hadn't expected: for the first time in two years, she stopped working evenings. The system handled what her notebook couldn't, and she got her time back.