Why We Don't Have a Coffee of the Month Club (and What Would Actually Need to Be True)
The question we get more than almost any other is some version of: can I just have you pick a coffee for me each month? Sometimes it's wrapped in a gift framing — "I want to give my dad a coffee subscription but only if it's good" — and sometimes it's pure convenience — "I don't want to think about it, just send me something different."
We hear you. And the honest answer is that a coffee-of-the-month club is something we'd love to offer, in theory. In practice, the math, the inventory problem, and the freshness problem make it a bad fit for the way we currently run the roastery. This is the longer explanation.
If you want the bottom line so you can skip the rest: we don't run a monthly club because every version of it we can build inside our current model would compromise either the freshness of the bag you receive or the predictability of the single-origin experience we built the brand around. So we haven't shipped one.
But the longer version is more useful, because it walks through what we've considered, why each option doesn't quite work, and what we'd actually need to change to add it.
For the parallel story on the subscription side, our why we don't do subscriptions yet post covers the broader subscription problem. For the discount-and-pricing math, our why we don't run sales post covers the margin side. This post is specifically about the monthly-club version of the same conversation.
What a coffee-of-the-month club actually is
The basic version is simple. A customer signs up. Once a month, the roaster picks a coffee and ships it. The customer pays monthly, gets a different bag each time, and doesn't have to think about it.
There are a few flavors of this that show up in the specialty coffee world:
The discovery club. Every month is a different coffee, usually from a different origin, often a single origin. The point is variety. Subscribers get to taste across a roaster's catalog without having to commit to a 12-ounce bag of anything. Trade and Driftaway are the most well-known examples of this model.
The origin club. Every month is a coffee from one specific region — Colombia in January, Ethiopia in February, Kenya in March. The point is depth on a particular origin family. Subscribers learn what each region tastes like by drinking it across an entire month.
The curated club. Every month is a single coffee that the roaster has specifically picked because it's the best thing they roasted that month. The point is the curation — the customer is trusting the roaster's palate. Most roasters who run this model describe it as "what we'd drink ourselves this month if we could only drink one bag."
The house-blend club. Every month is the same coffee — a flagship blend. The point is consistency. Subscribers know exactly what they're getting each time. This is the model that mass-market coffee subscriptions use, and it's the easiest one to operate.
The first three are what people mean when they ask us about a coffee-of-the-month club. The fourth is what a lot of people think they mean but don't actually want.
The inventory problem
Whatever flavor of monthly club we ran, we'd be holding inventory. That's not a problem for a roastery roasting 2,000 pounds a week, because inventory turnover is fast. It is a problem for us, because we roast to order.
The current cadence is Wednesday roast, Thursday ship. When you order a bag from us, that bag is roasted on the Wednesday after you placed the order. The roast date on the bag is the date your specific coffee was roasted. By the time it arrives at your door, it's typically 5 to 10 days post-roast.
For monthly clubs, we have to commit to shipping a specific coffee to a subscriber next month. Which means we have to decide now what coffee we'll be roasting for next month's shipment. Which means we have to hold inventory of that coffee until next month's shipment goes out. Which means we're not roasting to order anymore — we're roasting to inventory.
The longer the inventory sits, the worse the freshness gets. A bag roasted today and shipped in three weeks is a different bag than a bag roasted today and shipped tomorrow. The aromatic compounds that define the cup start to fade after about 10 to 14 days. By 4 weeks, even well-stored specialty coffee has lost enough of its top notes that the cup is noticeably different from what it was at 7 days post-roast.
We could mitigate this by reducing inventory to the smallest possible amount and shipping it as quickly as possible after roasting. But "smallest possible amount" still means a few weeks of inventory for a monthly club, because subscribers expect their coffee to arrive on roughly the same day each month, and our roast cadence is weekly.
A typical monthly club would require us to hold 3 to 5 weeks of inventory at any time, distributed across however many coffees we were sending that month. That's structurally incompatible with roasting to order.
The freshness problem (which is just the inventory problem in a different costume)
The inventory problem shows up as the freshness problem when the bag lands at the customer's door. The same bag that's acceptable at 7 days post-roast is degraded at 21 days post-roast. The bag that's degraded at 21 days is much worse at 35 days.
If we're running a monthly club and shipping bags 3 to 5 weeks after they were roasted, we're shipping bags that are past their freshness window. We could try to get around this by roasting smaller batches more frequently for the club specifically. But that means running two parallel production schedules — one for DTC orders, one for the club — which doubles the operational complexity.
The other option is to be honest about the freshness and ship older bags anyway, with a note explaining why. "This bag was roasted 3 weeks ago. Here's how to use it before it gets worse." That's an option. It's also a downgrade from what we currently promise, which is that every bag we ship is roasted within 7 days of arriving at your door.
We're not willing to ship bags that are 3 to 5 weeks old without telling subscribers clearly. And we're not willing to tell subscribers clearly, because that's a worse experience than the current one.
So either we solve the operational complexity (which is expensive) or we ship older bags (which is a worse product). Neither is a good outcome.
The catalog problem
The third issue is the catalog itself. We currently have about 15 SKUs, most of them single origin with seasonal rotation. Some of those are year-round staples (our Colombia, our Costa Rica Tarrazú, our Guatemala). Others rotate in and out as green coffee inventory changes (our Burundi, our Peru, our Yemen).
A monthly club needs a consistent flow of coffee. We need to know, three months from now, what coffee we'll be sending out. Which means we need to either:
- Commit to specific origins for specific months, three months in advance. (Hard, because our green coffee inventory doesn't always allow it.)
- Send the same coffee every month. (Boring, and doesn't match the spirit of "of the month.")
- Send whatever we happen to have on hand that month. (Inconsistent, and subscribers won't know what they're getting.)
None of those is great. The first option means we're committing to inventory we might not be able to source. The second option means we're a single-coffee subscription, which is a different product and a different conversation. The third option is basically what we already do with our regular catalog — and our regular catalog is already open for browsing on the site.
So in some ways, our existing catalog IS a "pick something yourself" version of a coffee-of-the-month club. The monthly club would be the same experience, but with us doing the picking. The difference is whether subscribers find value in the picking, which is the question the curation model is supposed to answer.
The curation question
The most honest version of the monthly-club idea is the curated one: every month, the roaster picks one coffee they think is exceptional, and that's what goes out to subscribers. The subscriber is paying for the curation, not for the coffee itself.
We could run this model. We could pick our best coffee each month and ship it to a list of subscribers. The math would be:
- Roast an extra 50 to 80 pounds per month, dedicated to the club.
- Pack those pounds into 12oz bags for subscribers.
- Hold the inventory for 1 to 3 weeks depending on subscriber cycle.
- Ship on a fixed monthly schedule.
That's a real, runnable business. The issue is that it would split our focus. We'd have two parallel product lines (the regular DTC catalog and the curated club), two parallel inventory pools, two parallel roast schedules. We'd need a dedicated packaging and shipping workflow for the club. We'd need to track subscriber preferences, manage cancellations, handle billing. All of that is real work.
For a roaster doing $5 million a year, that work is small relative to the rest of the business. For a roaster doing $200,000 a year, that work is most of the business.
If we ran the curated club, we'd spend 30% to 40% of our operational time on a product line that's 10% to 15% of our revenue. That's not a good ratio. We'd either need to grow the club to a much larger scale than we currently expect, or we'd need to staff up specifically to support it, or we'd need to accept that the regular DTC catalog gets less attention than it currently does.
None of those is obviously wrong. But all of them mean the roastery starts looking different from how it currently looks. We'd be moving from "small DTC-only roastery" to "small DTC roastery with a side subscription business." That's a real shift, and we'd want to be sure it's the right shift before committing.
What we'd need to add a monthly club
If we did decide to add a monthly club — and we haven't decided — here's what would actually need to be true.
A second roast day. Right now we roast Wednesday and ship Thursday. A monthly club with consistent monthly delivery would need a second roast day, probably Friday, dedicated to the club inventory. That's a real expansion of the roast schedule and would require either more roasting time on the existing roaster or a second roaster.
Inventory buffer. A 2-week safety stock of the monthly coffee. So if we're shipping 60 pounds of club coffee per month, we'd hold roughly 30 pounds of uncommitted inventory at any time. This is in addition to the regular DTC inventory, which means more storage space.
Subscription billing infrastructure. Shopify has a subscriptions app, but the integration with our roast-to-order workflow isn't seamless. We'd need to either commit fully to the Shopify Subscriptions app (with its constraints) or build a custom subscription system on top of our existing setup. Either is a project.
Pricing that covers the new costs. The monthly club would be priced higher than a single bag of our regular coffee, because we'd be absorbing the inventory cost, the second roast day, and the subscription management overhead. A realistic price for a curated monthly club, given our costs, would be something like $28 to $35 per shipment for an 8 to 12 ounce bag. That's a premium over our current $20 to $25 range.
An honest freshness promise. If we ran the club, we'd be shipping bags that are 2 to 4 weeks post-roast in most months. That's worse than our current DTC promise. We'd need to either accept the worse freshness, communicate it clearly, or build the operational complexity to ship fresher bags (which is more expensive).
A clear "what we're sending" story. If we ran the club, we'd need to commit to what subscribers are getting and why. "Each month, we pick the best single origin we roasted and ship it to you, with a note explaining why we picked it." That's the version we'd build. We'd need to write the monthly notes, pick the coffees, and own the curation in a way that's currently distributed across our regular catalog.
What we'd tell people who ask today
The most common version of the question is from someone who's been buying from us for a few months and wants to automate the next purchase. Our current answer is something like:
"We don't run a monthly club right now. Our roastery is built for direct-to-consumer orders roasted to order each Wednesday, and the inventory model for a monthly club doesn't fit cleanly with that. We have about 15 SKUs in the catalog and most subscribers end up just rotating through 3 or 4 favorites on their own schedule. If we add a monthly club in 2027, we'll let you know — but we won't be adding it until we can do it without compromising the freshness of the bags we send."
Some people get it. Some push back. A few say "but I'd pay more for it." The answer is still no, for the reasons above. We appreciate that people want this from us. We want to offer it someday. We're just not going to offer a version that ships older bags, hides the inventory story, or quietly downgrades the freshness of what subscribers receive.
The honest part
The coffee-of-the-month club is one of those product ideas that sounds simple and turns out to be a real business. The inventory model is different from ours. The freshness profile is different from ours. The catalog commitment is different from ours. The operational overhead is different from ours.
We're not opposed to it. We're not even opposed to building it. We're opposed to building a version of it that ships a worse bag than the ones we currently ship. As long as that's the tradeoff, we won't ship one.
If at some point we add a second roaster, a second roast day, the inventory buffer, the subscription infrastructure, and the curation story, then we'll build it. Until then, the closest thing is to subscribe to our email list and rotate through the catalog on your own schedule — which is what most of our regular customers end up doing anyway.
For the related read on the broader subscription side (which has more issues than just the monthly club), our why we don't do subscriptions yet post covers the same logic in longer form. For the catalog itself, the full collection is on the site, with single origins, blends, and a few seasonal lots that rotate in and out.
Brew slow. Sip slow. ☕