Getting started

Turning a roast into a product

Updated October 2026

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Fix the profile, not the result Print the roast date Decide how the gas gets out Settle whole bean or ground Write down the claims you intend to make What stops being optional Decide how fast you will sell it before you decide how much to make References

The step from roasting well to selling coffee is mostly repeatability and a date, because the product itself is usually already good enough.

Fix the profile, not the result

A roast profile is a curve of temperature against time, and it is the thing that can be repeated. Judging by color or by sound produces a different roast every time the ambient temperature, the batch size or the green coffee changes, which is every week. Logging and following a profile is what turns a good roast into a product.

Print the roast date

Not just a best-before. A roast date is the single most useful thing on a bag of coffee and it is what informed buyers look for, and printing it commits you to selling fresh stock rather than clearing old. That commitment is uncomfortable and it is also the whole proposition of a small roaster.

Decide how the gas gets out

Before choosing packaging, not after. Degassing is not optional and the options are a valve, a delay before packing, or a container that is not airtight. Each has consequences and each suits a different product, and the staling section works through them.

Settle whole bean or ground

They are different products with different shelf lives, and ground coffee stales several times faster because of the surface area. Offering both is reasonable and offering ground coffee with the same date as whole bean is not.

Write down the claims you intend to make

Origin, variety, process, altitude, farm. Every one of them is a claim about somebody else’s agriculture that you are repeating, and you need it in writing from the importer against the lot. Repeating what a sales sheet said is the version of this that collapses first.

What stops being optional

A roast log with the profile actually run, per batch.
The green lot, and its documentation, linked to the roast.
A roast date on every unit.
A retained sample from each roast, tasted later.

Decide how fast you will sell it before you decide how much to make

Batch size should follow demand rather than the capacity of the machine, because unsold roasted coffee is a write-off rather than inventory. That order feels backwards to anybody used to a shelf-stable craft and it is the whole discipline of this one.

References

21 CFR 101, Food Labeling, which carries the general requirements that apply here in the absence of a standard of identity: the statement of identity, net quantity, ingredient list and the name and place of business of the responsible party. law.cornell.edu

Written from federal regulation and from the published physics and chemistry of staling, not from a laboratory. There is no standard of identity for coffee or tea, so most of what governs a product here is the general requirement that labels be truthful and claims be substantiated. Anything here is a starting point for a conversation with your state department of agriculture, not a determination that you comply.