Joe Van Gogh is a specialty coffee roaster located in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Over the course of its 30 year history, Joe Van Gogh’s business model has grown to include a multitude of sales channels and services, such as:
- Five cafes throughout North Carolina
- A comprehensive wholesale program
- Online store and coffee subscriptions
- Private labeling/toll roasting services
- Equipment sales and technical support
With such a complex business model, the company’s roasting and production teams worked tirelessly to keep up with demand. However, outdated technology and manual production processes created massive logistical challenges for the company, leading to human error and bandwidth constraints across the company’s different departments.
If they wanted their company to continue to grow, Joe Van Gogh needed a way to automate production tasks, reduce human error, and streamline internal fulfillment processes.
Fortunately, they found RoasterTools.
Outdated Software Leads to Giant Inefficiencies
Kevin Swenk, Joe Van Gogh’s Director of Coffee, told RoasterTools that a former employee had previously built an internal software known as BeanBase. This software was designed to help Joe Van Gogh plan production needs for the day, monitor inventory, and provide traceability and transparency for organic certification purposes.
While the platform worked well for Joe Van Gogh’s internal production needs nearly 15 years ago, the outdated code and functionality couldn’t support the team’s continuous growth. “We grew at about 37-40% consecutively each year. It’s quite astounding how good that system [BeanBase] was designed 15 years ago,” says Swenk. “It’s been updated and expanded as much as possible. But it’s to the point where [BeanBase] can’t talk to other entities, making Quickbooks and other automations not possible.”
Among the biggest challenges created by the BeanBase platform was the need for employees to manually enter each order into the system. And, with Joe Van Gogh’s continuously expanding business model, the manual order entry process could take employees 4 to 5 hours each day. “It wouldn’t be until 10:00am or 10:30am before we could start roasting,” Swenk explains.
The obstacles created by the labor intensive data entry system meant that employees would come in as early as 5:00am or work on Sundays to keep up with the growing demand for roasted coffee and non-coffee item sales.
Adam Green, former Operations Manager, agrees with Swenk about BeanBase’s limitations and highly manual tasks. “Our whole system of collecting the data we needed to create packaging and fill orders was extremely manual with BeanBase,” says Green.
Another problem with a manual production system is human error. Entering hundreds of orders by hand each day inevitably leads to incorrect inventory counts, inaccurate order information, and unsatisfied clients.
Employees would also have to manually update inventory for Joe Van Gogh’s ecommerce site. Jami Shangler, Ecommerce Manager at Joe Van Gogh, explained how it was her responsibility to manually push inventory to the website each day. “We wanted a more automated process and better inventory control, because the numbers were always off,” says Shangler.
In 2020, as the global pandemic shut down coffee shops and forced customers to make coffee at home, Joe Van Gogh experienced a surge in ecommerce orders as a result. “We went from 20 web orders a week to 150 per day,” says Swenk. “And with our existing system, every web order required us to enter in an order, enter in a customer; it was very time consuming.”
Joe Van Gogh also boasts a large wholesale coffee program that includes private labeling and toll roasting services. As the company continued to grow this area of the business, Swenk noted it would be days or weeks before the new clientele were able to be added to the production schedule. This ultimately hindered the company’s ability to add new wholesale customers.
Naturally, the Joe Van Gogh team tested out other inventory management and production planning software in an attempt to alleviate their production concerns and ever-increasing demand. But all had functional limitations that would continue to hold their team back.
With a focus on total business growth, Joe Van Gogh turned to RoasterTools for a comprehensive production planning, inventory management, and ecommerce order fulfillment solution.
Implementing RoasterTools at Joe Van Gogh
After meeting Jon, the founder of RoasterTools, at the Specialty Coffee Expo, Joe Van Gogh was curious about how RoasterTools’ suite of technology could solve their internal production challenges.
Two members of the Joe Van Gogh team scheduled an initial conversation and demo with Jon. As Swenk puts it, “After that first conversation and demo with Jon, I remember Adam and I being like ‘Oh my God! This!’”
A second call was quickly scheduled with other members of the Joe Van Gogh team to evaluate whether RoasterTools would be a good fit. “As we started to list out what our concerns were and talked to Jon about them, we learned that they were already planned to be alleviated,” says Swenk.
Joe Van Gogh’s team continued to deliberate on a future RoasterTools implementation.
“We did the math and between every department, we discovered that RoasterTools could save us 10 hours of labor per day,” Swenk exclaimed. The potential time savings alone was enough to seal the deal.
RoasterTools worked hand-in-hand with Joe Van Gogh’s team to implement the software along with specific features to best suit Joe Van Gogh’s roasting, production, fulfillment, wholesale, and ecommerce needs.
To do this, RoasterTools helped Joe Van Gogh get set up with the following tools:
- Commerce Connections: Rather than inputting every web order from multiple sales channels, Joe Van Gogh’s team clicks a button and all online orders—regardless of sales channel—are automatically imported into RoasterTools. Plus, Joe Van Gogh is now able to connect to their private label customers’ ecommerce stores, streamlining the ordering and fulfillment process for all!
- Production Planning: Joe Van Gogh’s biggest hurdle was needing to manually add individual orders—web, wholesale, cafe, etc.—into their software. This would take hours each day, delaying their roast schedule. Now that orders are automatically imported, planning production is quick and streamlined. In addition to quickly planning out what needs to be roasted, RoasterTools also creates tasks for all steps in the production process, including packaging, labeling, and shipping.
- Inventory Management: Because of Joe Van Gogh’s complex business model, inventory needs to be tightly controlled. And, the team monitors more than green and roasted coffee inventory! From syrups to retail mugs, the entire Joe Van Gogh crew can now monitor all inventory in RoasterTools. In the previous system, all types of inventory were frequently oversold due to improper inventory counts stored in the system.
Swenk explains that aside from the production possibilities gained by introducing this software to the company, one of the biggest reasons for choosing RoasterTools was the team behind the tech. “Other software is built by software engineers, not roasters who designed [roastery] systems and saw the opportunity to take it forward.”
To the Joe Van Gogh team, this difference was evident in not only the functionality of the software, but also the design. “You can tell the software was created by a roaster. It’s clean, simple, and intuitive to how a roastery works. It’s not trying to fit the unique needs of roasting into some generic software that claims to work for every industry,” says Swenk.
👉RoasterTools was designed by roasters for roasters! We took our years of experience running a successful coffee roastery and the systems we built along the way and turned them into a tool any coffee roaster can use to grow their business. Check out our story!
To make the onboarding process as seamless as possible, RoasterTools worked directly with Joe Van Gogh’s employees to help implement the software. Joe Rayno, Accounts Manager, highlighted how pleasant it was working with the RoasterTools team during implementation. “The onboarding process with Jon and Dani was great. The response time is phenomenal; everything is done in a timely manner, especially if issues arise. It’s rare to actually look forward to a call with a software company!”
Shangler echoes Rayno’s sentiment, saying, “[RoasterTools] was there in the trenches with us as much as we were. That was amazing.”
Time Savings Leads to Unlimited Growth Potential
Once fully integrated into Joe Van Gogh’s daily operations, it was easy to see how RoasterTools benefited the company.
By eliminating the need to manually input every single order across all sales channels into a production planning software or spreadsheet, Joe Van Gogh was able to drastically save time and labor costs. This time savings lead their team to be far more efficient in processing orders. As such, their team has been able to process far more orders in the same amount of time.
Time Savings + Process Efficiency = Business Growth!
“The amount of orders that we can receive and process per day, that's the single biggest benefit,” says Swenk. “We were able to process 2-3 times as many online orders per day in Q4 of 2023 as opposed to the year before, when we didn’t have RoasterTools. This benefit was especially noticeable during the annual Black Friday/Cyber Monday surge that all of us in the industry experience.”
This growth has been evident among Joe Van Gogh’s other areas of the business model too, including private label and toll roasting clients. After implementing RoasterTools, Joe Van Gogh saw one client’s order volume increase by nearly 400%, and they were ready to handle the rapid growth. “We went from about 100 orders per week to 100 orders on Monday and Tuesday. And we’re able to turn them around every day!” Swenk explains.
With RoasterTools’ AutoPlan feature in place, the Joe Van Gogh team can also get ahead of the increasing demand by planning out future roast schedules to meet par levels and accommodate upcoming orders.
“Arriving to work first thing in the morning and having the entire day already laid out for us was a game changer. No more waiting for orders to be entered into our old system one-by-one. We also love the fact that everyone in our production team, from roasters to packaging to fulfillment and shipping, can see where we are in our production process.”
This enhanced productivity and business growth created yet another benefit for the Joe Van Gogh team: employees can now focus on other areas of the business.
Rayno joked that while RoasterTools has provided the team with greater time and labor savings, it hasn’t freed up his time because he’s now able to dedicate that time to other projects that can move the company forward and grow. One such project is the new equipment service department.
“It's just phenomenal to not have to put the orders in, and so that has freed my time up to do other things, which is great. It’s allowed me to really focus on growing the new service department,” says Rayno.
With a streamlined and automated production system in place, Joe Van Gogh’s team is now poised for ongoing growth. One area of the business that Swenk is especially excited about is the ability to grow with existing customers. “We didn’t have the bandwidth to grow with and service our existing customers to the level of service that we would prefer.” Now he is confident they can grow with their customers and add new ones.
It’s a good thing he’s feeling confident since Swenk also noted that “sales are way up!” As of January 2024, Joe Van Gogh had experienced a 35% increase in sales in comparison to the previous year.
When asked if Joe Van Gogh’s team would recommend RoasterTools to other roasting companies, the answer was a resounding “Yes!”
“I would absolutely recommend RoasterTools,” says Rayno. “It’s phenomenal.”
