Order cutoffs and lead times for wholesale coffee

Short answer. A cutoff is the time after which an order goes on the next roast instead of this one. A lead time is how long after that cutoff the coffee arrives. Set the cutoff one clear working day before each roast day, late afternoon, and the lead time at two working days from cutoff to delivery. Write both on the price list, in the terms and on every order confirmation, then give each café a par level big enough that missing the cutoff is an inconvenience rather than an empty hopper.

What a cutoff and a lead time actually are

They are three separate things, and roasteries lose arguments by collapsing them into one number.

The cutoff

A time, on a named day, after which an order joins the next roast. It exists to make the roast plan final while there is still a working day to buy nothing twice, check the green and split the batches.

The lead time

The gap from the cutoff to the coffee arriving. It covers the roast, the pack, the pick and the drive. Two working days is the common shape for a roastery with fixed roast days: roast the next morning, deliver the morning after.

The rest

How long the coffee sits before the café should open it. This one is not yours to manage, but it is yours to explain, because a café that opens Tuesday's roast on Wednesday morning will tell you the coffee is wrong.

The café only experiences the total. From "I need coffee" to "I can pull a shot with it" is the cutoff you made them wait for, plus the lead time, plus the rest. That total is the number to say out loud when you set expectations, and the number a café is really complaining about when it says your lead time is long.

The gap between what a roastery assumes and what a café assumes is wide. A roaster on r/roasting described cafés sending orders "after we close, requesting pickup 2 hours after we open the next day". Nobody involved is being unreasonable. One side is looking at a shelf, the other at a roast schedule, and nothing written down connects them.

Work your cutoff out from your roast days

Start at the roast day and walk backwards. Everything else follows from it.

1. Fix the roast days first. The day you roast wholesale is the one fixed point in the week. Do not set it around orders; set the orders around it.
2. Put the cutoff one clear working day before. One day is enough to plan batches, spot a coffee you are short of and call the two cafés you need to call. Two days is more comfortable for you and noticeably worse for the café.
3. Pick an hour late in the afternoon. 16:00 or 17:00. The head barista has seen the day's use and can count the shelf honestly. A morning cutoff makes the café guess a day earlier than it needs to.
4. Deliver on a fixed day, not "within 48 hours". A named day is something a café can plan a delivery-day stocktake around. A window is something it has to stay in for.

Worked example. You roast wholesale on Tuesday and Thursday. Cutoff is Monday 17:00 for the Tuesday roast and Wednesday 17:00 for the Thursday roast. Both roasts are delivered the next day, so the café gets Wednesday and Friday deliveries. Coffee roasted on Tuesday reaches the café on Wednesday and, with 24 to 48 hours on the shelf, is ready to dial in on Thursday or Friday.

Read that chain from the café's side and the honest sentence is: order Monday afternoon, pour it from Thursday. That is the number to put in the ordering policy, because it is the one that stops a café ordering on Monday for a Tuesday it has already run dry.

Two roast days a week is the sweet spot for most roasteries with a van. It halves how much coffee a café must hold, gives every account two chances a week to fix a mistake, and still leaves you two clean production days rather than five broken ones.

Rest and degassing set the floor

Roasted coffee gives off carbon dioxide for days after it leaves the drum. Fresh out of the roaster it brews and pulls unevenly, so specialty roasteries rest it before it goes out, and rest espresso longer than filter. Common practice is a few days for espresso, often somewhere between three and seven, and less for filter. There is no agreed figure: it moves with the roast profile, the degree of roast, the packaging and whether the bag has a valve. Treat any number you read, including that one, as other people's practice rather than a rule, and settle your own by tasting your own coffee on consecutive days.

Whatever your number is, it is the floor under the whole schedule, and it is the reason a rush order is not just an inconvenience. A roaster in Fresh Cup's August 2026 survey of 30 roasters put it plainly: "If you call in a bulk order and want it the same day, that may be difficult on both sides." The same roaster explained why the damage outlasts the one order, saying an emergency order "throws off the off-gassing because we'll need to roast again to backfill".

That is the part cafés never see. Roasting an unplanned batch on Wednesday does not only cost Wednesday. It takes the coffee that was resting for Friday's deliveries, so Friday's batch is younger than it should be, and the correction runs through the following week.

Two practical consequences. Write the roast date on every bag, so the café can see what it is opening. And when you set a café's par level, size it so the newest bag can sit untouched for your rest period. Delivery is not the finish line; the day the café is allowed to open the bag is.

Three schedules that work

Pick the row that matches how you actually roast. The times are examples: the shape is the part worth copying.

A cutoff on a Friday for a Monday roast is a trap on a bank holiday weekend. Publish the changed cutoffs for public holidays and your own closure two weeks ahead, and repeat them in the week itself.

Rush orders, and whether to charge for them

Before you price a rush, sort it. Three different things arrive as the same phone call:

• The café is out today. A real emergency, usually once a year per account. Fix it if you can and then fix the par level that allowed it.
• The café forgot, and will be out on Thursday. Not an emergency. There is a roast between now and then.
• The café has an event on Saturday. Not an emergency either, and it knew a fortnight ago.

Most of the first kind can be solved without roasting anything. Send what is already packed and rested, swap them to a coffee you have, or send a part order to bridge to the next roast day. That costs you a bag and a drive, not a batch and a schedule. Say no to roasting and delivering the same day, in writing, in advance: the coffee would be wrong when it got there.

Charge when the rush costs you something you can name. There are only two real costs: an extra delivery run outside your route, and a batch roasted off-plan with the backfill that follows it. Price the run at what it actually costs, which is the driver's hour, the van, and the work that did not get done while it was happening. If you would rather not have a fee at all, the alternative is not free delivery on demand; it is a firm, friendly answer that names the next roast day.

A few rules that keep a rush fee from becoming an argument:

• Publish it before you need it. It belongs in the ordering policy and the terms, not in a surprise line on the invoice.
• One flat number, applied every time. A fee you charge when you are annoyed and waive when you are not is not a price, and cafés compare notes.
• Waive it out loud. "There's normally a €15 charge for an extra run, I'm not charging you this time" teaches the policy. Waiving it silently teaches that it is not real.
• Watch the repeat payer. An account happily paying a rush fee twice a month has a par level that is wrong or an ordering habit that has no owner. Fix that instead of collecting.

Par levels, so the café orders enough to cover the gap

A cutoff only holds if missing it is survivable. That is what a par level is for: the amount of coffee that has to be on the shelf so one skipped order does not close the espresso machine.

The arithmetic is short. Weekly kilos ÷ deliveries per week = the size of each order. Add one full delivery cycle as buffer, and that buffer is the number that makes the cutoff safe.

Worked example. A café goes through 14 kg a week and takes two deliveries. 14 ÷ 2 = 7 kg an order. One cycle of buffer is another 7 kg. So it orders 7 kg twice a week, should hold about 14 kg the moment a delivery lands, and should never be below 7 kg. Miss a cutoff and it runs on the buffer for two days instead of calling you in a panic.

The same café on one delivery a week orders 14 kg and needs 14 kg of buffer, so 28 kg on the shelf on delivery day. That is a lot of bags for a café with a cupboard, and it is the strongest argument there is for delivering twice a week rather than hoping.

Three things worth saying when you set one:

• Say it in bags, not kilos. "Keep seven kilos in reserve" is a formula. "Never open your last seven bags" is something a closing barista can check.
• A buffer is also coffee getting older. A full cycle is the safe version. An account that has never missed a cutoff can run half a cycle and drink fresher coffee. A quiet account should run less buffer, not more.
• Set it in the first week. Par levels belong in onboarding a new café, alongside the cutoff, while the café is still expecting to be told how this works.

The standing order is the real fix

Some accounts will never own the ordering, and no cutoff will change that. Another roaster on r/roasting described the routine: "I have to text every week to see if they need anything, and usually get the 'oh yeah thank you I forgot to order' response." That is not a café being difficult. It is a job that nobody on their side has been given, landing every week on someone on yours.

A standing order flips the default. Instead of the order existing only if someone remembers, it exists unless someone changes it. The café's usual quantities go on every roast day automatically; the café can edit, add to or skip it up to the cutoff; you plan the roast from something real rather than from last week plus hope. Order Book does not do this part by itself: the café orders from its account each time, with its usual order at the top of the sheet, or you build a draft it confirms with one tap.

It works because it matches what most wholesale ordering already is. The majority of a café's order is the same every week, and the variation is one or two lines. Asking a head barista to retype the whole thing to change one line is how the whole thing gets forgotten.

Two cautions. A standing order that nobody ever edits will keep delivering to a café whose volume has quietly halved, so watch the accounts whose standing order has not changed in months against their own ordering rhythm. And make skipping easy and obvious. A café that cannot pause a delivery before it closes for two weeks will cancel the standing order instead.

Introducing a cutoff to accounts that never had one

If your cafés have been ordering whenever they like, the cutoff is a change to their week, and it deserves the same courtesy as a price change.

1. Ask your three biggest accounts before you publish. Not for permission, for their week. If your cutoff lands on the morning the head barista does stocktake, you will be breaking it yourself by the second week.
2. Give 30 days' notice, in writing, once. One short message with the days, the times and one sentence of reason: you roast to order so the coffee is rested when it arrives, and the plan has to be final the day before.
3. Put it everywhere the café will meet it. Under the price list, in the terms, on every order confirmation and on the delivery note. A policy that lives only in the announcement email is gone in a fortnight.
4. Start the week it starts. A cutoff with a soft launch is not a cutoff.

The first time someone misses it

Take the order, and tell them the date it now lands on. That is the whole intervention. The point is not to punish a late order, it is to make the consequence visible and ordinary: "Got it. That missed Monday's cutoff, so it will be with you Friday instead of Wednesday. Have you got enough to get through?" No lecture, no exception, no favour to remember.

If the delay would genuinely close them, bridge it with what you have on the shelf and still deliver the rest on the normal day. The bridge is the exception, not the schedule.

The account that always misses it

By the third time, the cutoff is not the problem, so stop restating it. Work through the mechanism instead:

• Put them on a standing order they can edit. This solves most of these accounts outright.
• Move their cutoff. If the owner does the admin on Sunday night, a Monday morning cutoff fits and a Friday one never will. A different cutoff for one account is a small cost; a rewritten roast plan every week is not.
• Send a reminder the day before the cutoff, with what they usually order in it, so replying is faster than remembering.
• Find out who is meant to order. Often nobody is. Getting a named person and a standing time is worth more than any policy.

Keep exactly one exception you will always make: a café completely out of coffee gets helped, every time. Everything else waits for the next roast. Deciding that in advance is what lets you say no to the rest without it feeling personal.

A one-page ordering policy to copy

Send this to every account, and to every new one in its first week. Replace everything in brackets with your own days, times and numbers. Keep it to one page: a two-page policy is one nobody reads and everybody argues with.

The same lines belong in your wholesale terms, where they are enforceable, and in short form under your price list, where cafés actually look. This page is the version you hand to a head barista.

Questions roasters ask

What is a good order cutoff time for a coffee roastery?

One clear working day before each roast day, at an hour the café is still awake and at work. Late afternoon, 16:00 or 17:00, works for most: the head barista has seen the day's use and the owner has not gone home. A cutoff at 09:00 forces the café to guess the night before, and a cutoff at midnight means you plan the roast with your coffee.

How long should the lead time be between a café's order and delivery?

Two working days from cutoff to delivery is normal for a roastery with fixed roast days: one to roast, one to pick and drive. Daily roasting can do it in one. The number matters less than saying it out loud and hitting it every week, because a café plans its own stock around the date you promised, not the date you managed.

Should a roaster charge a rush fee for a last-minute wholesale order?

Charge when the rush costs you something real, which is an extra delivery run or a batch roasted off-plan, and say so in your ordering policy before it happens. A flat published fee applied every time is a price; one you invent when you are annoyed is a fight. If an account pays it twice a month, the problem is its par level or its ordering habit, not its wallet.

How much coffee should a café keep on the shelf between deliveries?

Weekly kilos divided by deliveries per week, plus one delivery cycle as a buffer. A café using 14 kg a week on two deliveries orders 7 kg each time and keeps 7 kg in reserve, so a missed cutoff costs it nothing. Tell the café the buffer in bags rather than kilos, because that is what it counts on the shelf.

Can a café use coffee the same week it is roasted?

Usually yes, but not on the day it arrives, and espresso needs longer than filter. Roasted coffee gives off carbon dioxide for days after the roast, and a bag opened too early pulls differently from the one the barista dialled in. Decide your own number by tasting your own coffee, write it on the bag, and size the café's par level so the newest bag can be left alone that long.

What do you do about a café that always orders after the cutoff?

Stop treating it as discipline and change the mechanism. Put the account on a standing order it can edit, move its cutoff to an hour that fits its week, or send a reminder the day before. An account that misses every week is telling you that ordering does not have an owner on its side of the counter.

Where Order Book fits

In Order Book the cutoff is part of the café's ordering account rather than a line in an email. Each café signs in to its own account, sees its usual order at the top at its own prices, and can change or add to it right up to the cutoff, after which the order is final and joins the roast plan. Cafés that are due and have not ordered get one email before the cutoff, so the accounts that forget stop being a weekly text message.

Once the cutoff passes, the confirmed orders become the roast plan for the morning, the run sheet, the picking list and the delivery notes, so the schedule you promised is the one that gets roasted. Drift detection watches each account against its own rhythm, which is how you find the café whose orders no longer match what it sells.

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