Introducing Bellwether On-Demand and Bellwether Hub

As part of our mission to electrify coffee roasting and enable any business to source and roast their own incredible, sustainable coffee, we are proud to announce two new product offerings to expand the electrification of coffee.

Bellwether On‑Demand allows any business to purchase wholesale coffee, fresh‑roasted on demand at a nearby Bellwether location. Shipped in bulk 5lbs bags enabling any business to create their own brand of small‑batch, fresh‑roasted, sustainably sourced coffee with the lowest carbon footprint.

The Bellwether Hub is a multi‑roaster system connected by a single software interface, enabling larger businesses to roast high volumes of small‑batch artisan coffee. The automated system allows a single staff member to roast 2500 pounds per week on a 4‑Roaster Hub, with no training or prior experience required.

Our Story

When we set out to make the world’s first all‑electric, ventless and fully automated commercial coffee roaster, we didn’t do it to just add another roaster to the market, we did it to fundamentally change the coffee industry from the ground up.

Traditional coffee roasting technology has allowed us to build a robust global industry that sustains the lives of millions of farmers, retailers and consumers every day but has also come with many intractable challenges. Traditional roasters are unforgivably bad for the environment. Fueled by natural gas, conventional roasters and their afterburners contribute massively to coffee’s carbon footprint. With 8 billion kgs of coffee being roasted annually across the globe, that means billions of kgs of carbon emissions entering the atmosphere every year.

In addition to being hyper polluting, traditional manual roasters are difficult to learn, labor intensive to operate, expensive to install thanks to gas lines and ventilation, and largely inaccessible to most coffee businesses. Realizing that the conventional roasting model was unsustainable and unavailable to most coffee retailers, we set out to make a roaster that would help electrify coffee roasting around the world and allow everyone access to the many benefits of small‑batch, artisan coffee roasting. We set out to create the future of coffee.

Plug in and roast ‑ empowering any business to source and roast their own incredible coffee.

To do this, we first had to create the technology. We had to remake roasting from scratch by designing a roaster that didn’t rely on fossil fuels, didn’t require any ventilation or ducting, was fully automatic and required no special training to operate. It also had to hit the mark for quality, consistency, and repeatability while delivering on the promise of freshness, customization, and artistry that businesses were seeking. Thus, the Bellwether Roaster was born. The world’s first all‑electric, ventless and fully automatic commercial coffee roaster that could be installed almost anywhere and operated by anyone.

Now, with almost 200 Bellwether roasters installed in North America, we’ve prevented over 3M lbs of carbon from entering the coffee supply chain, imported millions of pounds of sustainable, ethically sourced green coffee, adopted an industry‑first pricing model for farmer pay equity, and helped countless business owners who had never roasted before, realize their dreams of roasting their own coffee.

The fact that 70% of Bellwether customers have never roasted before getting their Bellwether means we’re succeeding in our mission to electrify the industry and make coffee roasting more accessible, sustainable, and equitable for everyone across the supply chain.

Bellwether Hub: High‑volume, small‑batch roasting for large and growing businesses.

Once we figured out how to serve individual roasters in single‑location cafes, we looked to identify other parts of the industry we still hadn’t reached. We quickly realized that some businesses have larger volume operations but require the quality and freshness of small‑batch roasting, so we looked to identify solutions to help larger businesses do small‑batch roasting at scale. The beauty of having built a tech‑enabled roaster from the beginning, is that we already had the technology to connect multiple roasters in a single location which could execute the exact same roast of coffee in as many machines as necessary over and over again, thus creating an environmentally sustainable high‑volume roasting operation that could perform at the level of a large‑format commercial roaster but could be run by just a single person with no specialized training.

We explored this potential further and came up with the Bellwether Hub ‑ a multi‑roaster, software connected platform for executing large‑volume, small batch, artisan roasted coffee. By connecting 4 roasters in a Hub a single staff member can roast 2500 lbs per week, servicing dozens of wholesale clients, cafe locations, grocery stores and online retail consumers with no specially trained labor.

The Bellwether Hub brings the world’s most sustainable coffee roaster to the very reaches of our industry that stand to have the greatest impact on making our industry more sustainable. By unlocking the potential of tech‑enabled multi‑roaster hubs, we’re enabling businesses of any size to take ownership of their coffee quality, freshness, sustainability and brand all at once.

Bellwether On‑Demand: Fresh roasted coffee on‑demand, no roaster required.

Finally, we realized that not every coffee business has the funds, the volume or even a retail space to make use of their own coffee roaster. Many emerging and nontraditional coffee businesses have a need for truly sustainable, fresh roasted, fully customizable roasted coffee and we want them to have access too ‑ serving a better, fresher product that meets their needs and reflects their values, even if they never roast in‑house.

So we looked to our software to help us serve these smaller and developing businesses. With a fleet of software‑connected, small‑batch coffee roasters in our network, we realized we could launch an on‑demand network for roasting and distributing fully customizable coffee that's fresh, high quality and sustainable, to any retail business serving any market. Introducing, The Bellwether Network. Allowing any coffee retailer to roast to order through a network of small batch distributed roasters with absolute consistency and control. Sustainably roasted on a Bellwether Roaster in their area and shipped fresh to their door.

This solution brings sustainable coffee roasting to a diverse range of coffee retailers like new businesses looking for a place to start, online businesses drop‑shipping to consumers, and cafes looking to serve their own brand but for whom roasting in‑house isn’t a fit.

Small‑batch sustainable roasting for every business model.

Sustainable, small‑batch roasting is at the core of our mission to change the future of the coffee industry. Whether our customers buy coffee from a Bellwether Network partner to service their own customers, open a cafe and begin roasting with a Bellwether of their own, or grow and scale to the needs of a high‑volume Bellwether Hub, we are actively expanding who we can reach and serve to address our goal of transforming roasting overall. In order to fully electrify our industry, reduce our carbon footprint, enable any business to serve the freshest coffee possible and create their own brand of sustainable small‑batch fresh roasted coffee.

Now retailers of every size and type can access the Bellwether roasted product that works best for their business, and realize the many benefits of serving fully customized, truly sustainable, fresh roasted coffee.