Green coffee inventory management for specialty roasters: what breaks, and why

Every specialty roaster we've talked to tells the same story at some point: they opened a bag labeled 50 lbs and it was 38, or they ran out of a single origin mid-roast because the Shopify bag count said 47 and the reality said 11. Green coffee inventory management at roastery scale is genuinely hard — here is the reason it keeps breaking and what a reliable system looks like.

The three forces that make it hard

• Roast loss: finished product does not equal green pulled. A 1 lb bag ≠ 1 lb of green.
• Blend ratios: one SKU can depend on three lots depleting at different rates.
• Channel sprawl: Shopify, wholesale, subscriptions, farmer's market — every channel deducts the same green pool.

Why spreadsheets fail here (specifically)

A spreadsheet will happily let you sell 200 lbs of a 100-lb lot. It has no concept of cost basis, lot-level FIFO, or that the Kenya single-origin and the house blend are drawing from the same container. When you find the discrepancy, it is usually at the end of the month, and it is usually large enough to affect your COGS number for the quarter.

What a working system actually does

• Tracks each green lot as its own entity with cost, origin, arrival, and current weight.
• Maps every SKU to one or more lots with explicit ratios.
• Deducts green automatically when an order is paid, roast-loss-adjusted.
• Alerts before you're out, not after.