The Story Behind Our Monday Roast Day (and Why It's Different From the Wednesday Roast)

The Story Behind Our Monday Roast Day (and Why It's Different From the Wednesday Roast)

If you've ordered from us recently, you may have noticed that we now roast twice a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. The Wednesday roast is the original — that's been our schedule since we opened. The Monday roast is new, and we added it for a specific reason.

This is the inside view of why we added it, what gets roasted on each day, and how the change shows up in the orders you receive.

The original schedule

For our first year-and-change, we roasted only on Wednesdays. The schedule was simple: roast Wednesday, ship Thursday. Orders placed any time from Friday morning through Tuesday afternoon would arrive in the Thursday shipment. Orders placed Wednesday afternoon or later would wait until the following Thursday.

The schedule worked for a while. It gave the coffee a full week to degas before it reached anyone, which is part of why our shipping rhythm produced a consistent cup. It also kept our costs down, because we ran the roaster once a week and paid for the propane once a week.

But the schedule had a downside. Customers who ordered Wednesday afternoon through Thursday morning — a real customer group, particularly on the East Coast — had to wait nine days before the Thursday shipment. That's a long wait for fresh-roasted, and it pushed them to the older roasts.

What changed

In the late spring we started getting the same kind of email from customers who had just ordered: "I ordered on Thursday and I'm seeing a roast date from a week ago. Can you ship it sooner?" The answer was no — until we added a second roast day, we couldn't.

So in early summer we added a Monday roast day. The schedule now is:

  • Monday morning. Roast. Bags sealed by the end of the day.
  • Tuesday. Pre-shipment: orders placed since the previous Wednesday morning are packed.
  • Thursday morning. Roast. Bags sealed by the end of the day.
  • Friday. Pre-shipment: orders placed since the previous Tuesday afternoon are packed.

The result is that any order placed between Wednesday morning and the following Tuesday afternoon will ship on the next available roast day, with a roast date that's at most seven days old.

A few notes on what this changed:

  • The older-roast problem is mostly gone. A customer who orders on Monday evening and gets a bag with a Monday-roast date has a coffee that's at most one day old. A customer who orders on Wednesday evening and gets a bag with a Wednesday-roast date has a coffee that's at most one day old. The window for "fresh roast" has tightened.
  • The shipping cadence is now twice a week. Tuesday and Friday are the ship-days, with the corresponding roast dates of Monday and Thursday.
  • The orders are split roughly 60/40 between the two days. The Monday roast typically fills more orders than the Wednesday roast, because the Wednesday-to-Tuesday afternoon orders all go to the Monday roast.

What gets roasted on each day

Not every coffee gets roasted on both days. The schedule is:

  • Monday roast. The full catalog. We roast everything we offer — every coffee, every blend, every decaf, every espresso variant.
  • Wednesday roast. A subset. We roast the most-ordered 8-10 SKUs on the Wednesday roast. The niche SKUs (low-volume single-origins, the seasonal offerings) only get roasted on Mondays.

This means that if you order a niche single-origin on a Wednesday or Thursday, your bag may have a Monday roast date — meaning the bag is 5-7 days old by the time it reaches you. It's still within the peak window, but it's older than the average.

If you order a mainstream coffee on a Wednesday or Thursday, your bag may have a Wednesday roast date — meaning it's 1-3 days old by the time it reaches you. That's the freshest we ship.

Why we don't roast every day

We've considered moving to a daily-roast schedule, and we've decided not to for now. The reasons:

  • Cost. Running the roaster every day increases our propane and labor costs by a factor of 3-4. We'd have to either raise prices or accept a lower margin, and we're not ready to do either.
  • Cup quality. Our roaster is a 25-kilo machine, and our typical batch is 8-12 kilos. Running smaller batches more frequently produces a slightly less consistent cup. The Wednesday-roast cadence we had for a year-and-a-half was tuned to that batch size, and the cup is better with a less-frequent rhythm.
  • Team size. We have one roasting lead and a packing team of two on roast days. Adding daily roasts would require hiring another roasting lead or restructuring the team.

For now, twice-a-week is what works. If volume grows, we'll revisit.

How to read the roast schedule

If you're trying to figure out when your order will ship, the rough rule is:

  • Order before Tuesday 9 AM PT. Ships Tuesday with a Monday roast date.
  • Order before Friday 9 AM PT. Ships Friday with a Wednesday roast date.
  • Order after Friday 9 AM PT. Ships the following Monday with a Monday roast date.

We're a small enough operation that the rule isn't perfect — if we have a slow week, sometimes we shift the schedule by a day. We post the actual roast schedule on our site the day before each roast.

What this looks like for you

A few practical notes:

  • If you care about the freshest possible roast. Order Monday evening through Tuesday morning, or Thursday evening through Tuesday morning. Your bag will be 1-3 days old when it arrives.
  • If you don't mind slightly older. Order Wednesday afternoon through Friday morning. Your bag will be 3-5 days old when it arrives.
  • If you want a specific coffee. Check the catalog page for the SKU. Niche coffees only ship on Tuesdays, with the Monday roast. Mainstream coffees ship on Tuesdays or Fridays.
  • If you want a specific roast level. The Wednesday roast typically has the full dark-roast lineup. The Monday roast has the full lineup including all single-origins.

The schedule isn't going to change for a while. Twice-a-week is what works for our size, and we're not interested in becoming a daily-roast operation until volume justifies it.

What we learned from the change

The Monday roast has been a noticeable improvement for the customer experience. A few specific things we've seen:

  • Email volume is down. Customers who used to ask "why is my coffee a week old?" mostly don't ask anymore. The question comes up once a month now, where it used to come up twice a week.
  • Reorder cadence is faster. Customers who used to wait until the next roast to reorder now reorder when they run out. The Monday roast captures orders that would have waited for the Wednesday.
  • Customer satisfaction is up. The reviews and the customer emails mention freshness more than they used to. The Monday roast gave us a more consistent story to tell about freshness.

The change was a small one in operational terms — we added a roast day and adjusted the packing schedule — but it had a real effect on the customer experience. If you've ordered from us recently and noticed the change, this is why.

P.S. If you want to see the actual roast schedule for the week, it's posted on the front page of our site on Mondays and Thursdays. The schedule lists the SKUs roasted on each day, the expected ship times, and any adjustments for the week.

— Seraphina