Wholesale Handler
The roast day is the deadline the cutoff is protecting
Published wholesale pages from roasters state their schedule in the same order every time: the roasting days first, then the ordering deadline, then delivery as a consequence. One roastery roasts Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and fulfils on the next roasting day after the order lands. Another roasts on a fixed weekday block and closes ordering the night before the production run that covers the week. A third asks for orders by Tuesday to make that week's roasting schedule at all.
None of them expresses the rule as hours before delivery, because delivery is not the constrained step. Green coffee is weighed against a batch list, a blend commits several lots at once, and the drum runs a fixed number of batches in a shift. Once that list is built, an extra 5 lb of a house blend is not a line added to a van, it is a batch added to a shift that was already full.
The practical consequence for an account is harsher than in most trades. A late order in produce misses a van and arrives the next morning. A late order at a roastery that roasts twice a week misses a roast, and the next slot may be three days out. At a single weekly production day it is a full week.
Counting the lead time back from a roast day
Work backwards through the steps that actually consume time, and stop at the first one a customer's change would disturb.
- Fix the roast days. Everything else is a consequence of them, so they are not a policy choice to be softened later.
- Add packing and the delivery route to find which delivery days each roast slot can serve.
- Set the internal deadline: the moment the batch list is built, green is weighed off and blends are committed.
- Set the customer deadline ahead of that. The gap between the two is the margin that absorbs a late order without touching the roast.
The two-deadline split is what stops the cutoff being either brittle or meaningless. A roaster whose customer deadline is Monday midday, internal deadline Tuesday morning and delivery Wednesday can take a Monday-evening order as a favour and still print an unchanged batch list. A roaster who publishes only one deadline has to either refuse that order or redo the plan.
The Friday delivery in that table does not close on Thursday night. It closes when Thursday's batch list is built, which is the day before. How to set a wholesale bakery order cutoff counts the same way from a bake.
Rest time belongs to the cafe, not to the lead time
Roasted coffee releases CO2 for days after it leaves the drum, and how long a given coffee should rest before it is brewed is disputed. Espresso is generally given longer than filter, naturals longer than washed, light roasts longer than dark, and the numbers named by working head roasters range from a day or two for manual brewing to two or three weeks for competition. Any single figure written into an ordering policy will be wrong for half the menu.
It does not need to be in the policy, because the rest happens on the cafe's shelf after delivery. Plenty of roasters ship a day or two off roast on purpose so the beans arrive at the start of the window rather than the end. The cutoff only has to cover roast, pack and route.
The exception is a roastery that holds coffee back to rest it in house before it ships. That is a fixed number of days added to every delivery day, which belongs in the ordering terms stated once, not in an explanation given per order.
Each delivery day carries its own cutoff
Roast days are rarely evenly spaced, so a single "order 48 hours ahead" rule is wrong on at least one day of the week. It is too tight on the day after a roast and needlessly early on the day before one.
In Wholesale Handler each accepted delivery day carries its own cutoff, set as a lead-time offset before that day. A Monday delivery can close on the Friday, because the roast that fills it is built on the Friday, while a Thursday delivery stays open until the night before. Delivery days, their cutoffs, the minimum spend, the delivery charge and how far ahead ordering opens all sit on an order profile, and customers are assigned to profiles in bulk. Accounts on the twice-weekly run and accounts on a single weekly drop are two profiles, not two sets of rules retyped per cafe.
How to stop wholesale customers ordering after the cutoff covers enforcement for any trade, and How to take wholesale coffee orders from cafes covers the account side, including what a cafe's reorder looks like week to week.
A reminder before the deadline is not enforcement
Roastery software in this space largely sends reminders. A portal that emails an account the morning its ordering day opens is useful, and it is not a cutoff: the order form still accepts the order afterwards, and the deadline lives in the roaster's own fulfilment view rather than in the cafe's date picker. Production planning tools then make a virtue of letting a last-minute wholesale order be dropped into the week's plan, which is the behaviour the deadline existed to prevent.
The difference a server-side cutoff makes is that the refusal happens without anyone at the roastery being awake. In Wholesale Handler a date the customer cannot pick names the rule that closed it, one of non-delivery day, holiday, cutoff passed or not open yet, alongside whatever the merchant has written as their own cutoff message. A cafe manager doing the order at 6am gets the answer and the next available date at the same moment, which is the thing an email cannot do. What a wholesale customer portal is covers what else the account sees when it signs in.
A holiday week is where per-day cutoffs earn their keep, because the roast days move and the cutoffs have to move with them. How to set wholesale order cutoffs for a peak season covers that shift.
Telling an account the window has closed
The wording that holds up names the roast rather than the rule. "Friday's delivery is roasted on Thursday and the batch list is built Wednesday afternoon" is a fact about the drum, and it carries no implication that the account is being punished for lateness. "The cutoff has passed" invites a negotiation about the cutoff.
Offer the alternative in the same message: the next delivery slot, or collection from the roastery a day earlier than the next route. A roaster who keeps a narrow margin between the customer deadline and the internal one has a real answer to give rather than a refusal.
For an account that misses the deadline most weeks, the fix is structural rather than conversational. A standing order places itself at that day's cutoff, re-priced and re-checked at that moment, so the cafe's baseline volume is on the batch list whether anyone remembered or not, and the only thing they have to send is a change. What a standing order is in wholesale covers how the repeat is set up.
What an ordering cutoff does not do
Wholesale Handler schedules the order, not the roast. There is no green-coffee inventory, no roast profiles, no roast logging and no batch tracking, so the production plan stays in your roasting software or your spreadsheet. What changes is that the order set the plan is built from stops moving.
Two limits matter when a roastery closes for a week. A closure blocks the delivery dates for ordinary orders, but it does not stop a standing order placing, so schedules landing inside a shutdown have to be paused by hand before it starts. And a placed order cannot be edited by the merchant, so a correction is a cancel and a re-place rather than an amendment.
Invoices do not raise themselves on a schedule either. Invoicing a week's deliveries is a deliberate action, and the export covers invoiced line items rather than the whole order book.
