When you are starting at a small scale, it’s easy to keep track of coffee by listing it alphabetically. As your coffee and your library of roasting history grows larger, adopting a naming strategy is helpful to group coffees together in list view.
How the Mill City Roastery Names Profiles
When we name a coffee, we alway kick off the name with either a B, SO, or Z.
B_(blend name)
This ensures our coffee blends stay at the top of our list alphabetically as our biggest sellers, most commonly roasted. Blends aren’t going anywhere unless you retire them or bring them out seasonally.
SO_(origin)-(details, processing)
As your coffee list grows, having 'SO' or another name at the beginning of single origin coffees can help keep clutter out of list view. It may not seem like a problem to sort alphabetically during the first year or two of roasting, but as you grow you will have many coffees stacking on top of each other.
Bonus: adding the month and year to a single origins name can help you reference how different coffee roasts after years of different harvests in your organization.
Z_(project name)
These are profiles that are roasted very infrequently. They may be for annual fundraisers or for private label clients who only order coffee a few times each year. These profiles will go to the bottom of our list, since we don’t need to reference them often.
Out with the Old, In with the New
Mill City's Roastery has past experiences with other data logging software which led to cluttered and confusing lists that were difficult to navigate. . Now that you have seen where we are, let's look at where we came from.
In the graphic above, you can see how using basic naming conventions with specific roast levels across multiple machines started to get confusing. Initially, this method seems easier to work with. In reality, it added up quickly over time. There is an easier way!
Here is one coffee profile acting as a drawer to pull up all roast levels, batch sizes, and identity favorites quickly. It’s cleaner, more user-friendly, and will be much easier for your production team to navigate.
Start Your Systems Now
Finding your system can feel like a daunting task, but these are a few ways Mill City's Roastery has simplified the process. You don’t need to go back in the archives and fix your old system to make this work; just start doing it moving forward. If you’re still small, you’re ahead of the curve (pun intended).
See you on the forums!
