When One of Our Coffees Starts Selling Out (and What We Do About It)
You went to buy the coffee you have been drinking for three weeks, and the page said sold out. That happens here more often than it might look, and it deserves a straight answer instead of a countdown timer.
Here is why. We keep the catalog small on purpose — about 15 SKUs, with a 12 oz bag of coffee at $24.99 and a 3 oz pouch of loose-leaf tea at $19.99. We roast on Wednesday and ship on Thursday. We do not hold a warehouse of finished coffee, so what we roasted last week is what exists until the next Wednesday.
Running low is a normal Tuesday here, not an emergency and not a marketing event. Here is exactly what we do when it happens, and where the honest edges are.
Why the catalog is small on purpose
Three reasons, and all three are about quality rather than growth.
Freshness. Roasting weekly only works if you actually roast what gets ordered. A bigger catalog means bigger batches, which means coffee sitting in a bin waiting for a shipping day. We would rather have 15 coffees we roast to order than 40 we roast once a month and ship for the following six weeks.
Green coffee is the expensive part. Before we roast a single bag, we have already paid for sacks of green coffee sitting in storage somewhere until they are opened. Every extra SKU is money committed to coffee that has not been roasted yet. Fifteen coffees is roughly as much as we can carry without turning our own cash into a warehouse.
A small catalog lets us say something specific about each coffee. With 15 items, we know all of them. We can tell you the Colombia is the one we drink most mornings and the washed Ethiopia is the one to buy when you want brightness. Our guide to how we pick which coffees to stock covers the buying criteria, but the short version is that every item has to earn a place in a lineup that small.
Price follows the same logic. A 12 oz bag sits at $24.99 and 3 oz of loose-leaf tea at $19.99, and the bigger sizes step up from there — a pound is $29.99, two pounds $49.99. A narrow band means you are not paying more for a coffee because we felt like charging more this week.
Some coffees are limited because the lot is limited
Not every coffee in the catalog exists in endless quantity, and the limit has nothing to do with how many people are buying.
A single micro-lot is one specific harvest from one farm or washing station. If the importer has 30 kilos, that is the lot. When it is gone, the next shipment is a different harvest with a different flavor, and we sell it under a different name rather than pretending it is the same coffee.
A small green-lot allocation works the same way. Importers sell to small roasters in sacks, and the standard sizes are roughly 30 kg for some Central American origins, 60 kg for most origins, and 69 kg for Brazil and Ethiopia. We buy sacks, not "as much as we want." If an importer allocated us one 30 kg sack, one sack is what exists.
The arithmetic is worth doing out loud, because it explains the whole post. A 30 kg sack of green coffee loses roughly 15% of its mass in the roast — that is water leaving as steam. So 30 kg in becomes about 25.5 kg out, which works out to roughly 75 bags of 12 oz. Roast 12 bags of that coffee on a Wednesday and the sack covers about six roast days. Then it is gone.
A seasonal tea has the same shape. A first flush from a single garden has one picking window a year, and when the window closes the tea is gone until the next spring.
What a "sold out" label actually means on our site
It means one specific thing: the coffee we have is gone for now. The label is a statement about inventory, not about popularity.
We do not have a demand tracker, and we do not use page views or waitlists to decide what to bring back. There is no countdown clock, and we are not writing "only 3 left" because three is the number the site generates when inventory hits three. When the number hits zero, the add-to-cart button goes off.
That distinction matters, because "sold out" has been turned into a sales tool by a lot of other stores. Here it is a status line, and it looks the same whether 40 bags went out in a week or one bag went out in a month.
The second thing it means: the coffee may well come back. Some coffees are gone for a week and back the next roast, because we have green coffee in storage and the only missing piece was a Wednesday. Others are gone until the next harvest, and then we say so.
What we do when a coffee runs low
In order, every time.
1. We say so plainly on the product page. The page tells you the coffee is out. It does not say "almost gone" or "selling fast," and there is no urgency bar. If we have a date for the next roast, the date goes on the page. If we do not have one, we say that we do not.
2. We do not take orders we cannot fill. If a coffee is out, the add-to-cart button is off. We would rather lose the sale than ship you something else with a note attached.
3. We point you to the closest coffee in the catalog and explain why it is close. Closest means one of three things: the same origin and process, a different coffee at the same roast level with a similar cup, or the coffee we actually drink most. We would rather say "the Colombia has the same chocolate weight and a similar body, and it is $24.99" than drop you on a category page and make you sort it out.
4. We tell you when the next roast is. Wednesday, and it ships Thursday. We ship on Thursdays precisely so the gap between a coffee running out and a coffee coming back is short. If the green coffee is already committed and the next roast is a week or six weeks out, we say the week or the six weeks, not a vague "coming soon."
5. We do not fake scarcity. A coffee we can roast every Wednesday does not get a limited-time label. A coffee we can buy again next month does not get a countdown timer. Manufacturing urgency on an item you can have on Thursday would train you to wait for a sale instead of paying the price.
How we decide what to restock
Three questions, in this order.
Is the lot repeatable? A coffee from a single washing station may come back with the next harvest, but it is a different coffee. A blend built from several lots is repeatable and can go back on the schedule any Wednesday. This one question decides most restocks.
How many Wednesday roasts does the quantity cover? Take the sack, subtract the 15% the roast takes off, and divide by what you would roast in a week. For the 30 kg sack above, that is about 25.5 kg roasted, or roughly 75 bags of 12 oz, or about six weeks at 12 bags a roast. We buy and roast to that arithmetic, not to a feeling about how much we would like to sell.
Does it earn a slot in a 15-item catalog? We review the lineup every quarter. If a coffee has sat through two quarters without finding its people, it gets replaced by something that has earned its place. That is a harder conversation than adding another SKU, and it is the one that keeps the catalog worth reading.
The price does not change based on any of this. A 12 oz bag stays at $24.99, because a fixed price is a promise about the catalog, and a limited lot is a fact about supply rather than about what the coffee is worth to you.
Why we do not raise the price when stock runs low
Because the moment scarcity moves price, the price stops describing the coffee and starts describing the state of our inventory.
First, you get a catalog where the same coffee costs $24.99 one week and $34.99 the next, and the only way to get the lower price is to know that we had it. That rewards people who track our stock rather than people who enjoy the coffee.
Second, and worse, it trains people to wait for the spike. Raise a price and you have taught your buyers that buying later is smarter. Every bag we sell at a higher number is margin handed back to the people who waited.
The price of a coffee should be a function of what it costs us to source, roast, and ship it, plus a margin we can live with. If a coffee is worth $24.99, it is worth $24.99 on the day it is plentiful and on the day it is gone.
"Isn't this just scarcity marketing?"
The strongest objection to everything above, so let's take it head on.
If we told you a coffee was running low because demand was high, that would be scarcity marketing. We do not do that, and we will not do it about any coffee on our shelf right now. When a coffee is out on our site, the reason is that the coffee ran out. We are not putting a number on which reason it was, because the number is not the point.
The test we use is simple: would we be comfortable if you read the page six months later? If the answer needs a count of interested people to sound true, it is not true. If the answer is "we bought one sack and the sack ran out," it holds up.
We also do not use sold-out status to steer you toward a bigger bag so we do not lose the sale. If the coffee you wanted is gone, we would rather you come back in two weeks than spend $49.99 on coffee you did not choose.
And we are not going to pretend the small catalog is a virtue when it creates a real problem. When a limited lot is gone, there is no substitute with the same flavor, and that is a genuinely annoying thing to explain to someone.
The limits of running it this way
We do not warehouse every coffee. We hold green coffee in storage, not roasted coffee on a shelf. A coffee can be available one week and gone the next, with no warehouse of finished bags to draw down. Some stores solve this by roasting ahead and holding 40 bags of a coffee for two months. We will not pretend to do that. If you want coffee sitting on a shelf for six weeks, we are the wrong shop.
We cannot promise a date we do not control. We control the Wednesday roast and the Thursday shipment. We do not control the importer's allocation, the harvest, the freight, or the post office. So the honest answer to "when will it be back" is sometimes "I do not know yet," and we will say that.
We have no backup supplier for a one-off. If an importer cannot ship us more of a specific lot, there is no second sack of the identical coffee waiting for us. There is a different coffee, and it may not taste the same under the same name.
None of that is fixable without becoming a bigger operation with a warehouse, a larger green coffee budget, and a longer list of coffees nobody is waiting for.
If you are here because a coffee you wanted is out
Browse the catalog and pick the closest thing by origin and roast level. If you are unsure, the coffee we drink most mornings is the one we would point you to first, and it is priced the same as everything else on the shelf. Order before Wednesday and your coffee ships Thursday, arriving four to seven days later for most U.S. addresses.
If a specific coffee was out when you went looking, tell us which one in an email. We read every one, and when it comes back we will write to you before it goes back on the shelf.
P.S. Storage is the other half of this story. A bag that sits open on your counter for three weeks will taste like something else entirely, and a lot of the frustration around running out is really a freshness problem. We wrote about what actually changes when coffee sits on a shelf.
Brew slow.
— Seraphina