RIPON, Wis. — Farspeak Labs LLC, a software development firm founded by industry practitioners, has officially announced the general availability of RoastConsole, an all-in-one management platform designed to consolidate the disparate workflows of professional coffee roasting operations. By integrating roast logging, inventory management, production scheduling, wholesale CRM, and financial invoicing into a singular ecosystem, the software aims to replace the fragmented, multi-subscription models currently dominating the specialty coffee market.

The launch, spearheaded by co-founders Jenaro Lopez—a consultant at Johannesburg-based Seam Coffee—and Ryan Prellwitz, alongside lead developer Micah Schoff, marks a significant shift in how small-to-mid-sized roasting businesses manage their data. For many roasteries, the operational burden has historically been exacerbated by the need to bridge the gap between roast profiling tools, accounting software, and manual inventory spreadsheets. RoastConsole seeks to automate these hand-offs, ensuring that data generated on the roaster floor directly influences procurement, sales, and financial reporting.

The Problem of Fragmented Roastery Management

The specialty coffee industry has experienced a period of rapid professionalization over the last two decades. As roasteries have scaled, they have increasingly adopted digital tools to maintain consistency and quality. However, this transition has often been piecemeal. A typical modern roastery often manages its business through a "stack" of independent software products: a dedicated platform for roast profiling (such as Cropster or Artisan), a separate inventory management system, a distinct accounting package, and a third-party CRM for wholesale management.

This fragmentation creates a "data silo" effect. When a roast profile is created, the information regarding green coffee consumption, roast loss, and roasted inventory levels must be manually transcribed or exported into other platforms to trigger invoicing or production planning. This creates significant administrative overhead, introduces the risk of human error, and makes it difficult to calculate the true cost of goods sold (COGS) in real-time.

RoastConsole addresses these inefficiencies by treating the entire roastery as a single, interconnected record. By tethering the physical act of roasting to the administrative tasks of invoicing and inventory, the software ensures that the production flow is mirrored in the digital record without redundant data entry.

A Chronology of Development

The development of RoastConsole was rooted in the personal frustrations of its founders. Working within the daily pressures of roasteries like Compañon Coffee Roastery in Ripon and Seam Coffee in Johannesburg, the team recognized that the software available to them was optimized for isolated tasks rather than holistic business management.

The project began as an internal effort to streamline their own workflows. Micah Schoff, collaborating with Lopez and Prellwitz, built the system with a "record-first" architecture. Rather than building a suite of separate apps, the team designed a core database that acts as the single source of truth for the roastery.

Following a period of internal testing and refinement, the company finalized the "Pilot" application—a free Mac-based tool that interfaces directly with roasting hardware. This application allows roasters to log batches and track temperature curves in real-time. By connecting this tool to the wider RoastConsole ecosystem, Farspeak Labs transitioned from a concept to a functional commercial product. The official launch this month represents the culmination of this development cycle, moving from a boutique internal solution to a market-ready platform available to the broader specialty coffee community.

Technical Infrastructure and Integration

A key feature of the RoastConsole ecosystem is its commitment to interoperability. Recognizing that many roasteries have years of historical data stored in legacy systems, the company has ensured that Pilot—the software’s roast-logging component—is capable of importing existing profiles from industry-standard tools like Cropster, Artisan, and RoastPATH.

The software is deployed via a tiered pricing structure that eschews the industry-standard "per-seat" or "per-machine" models. Instead, Farspeak Labs has opted for a unified subscription plan starting at $79 per month, which scales based on the volume of coffee roasted. This approach is intended to provide predictability for business owners, who are often hit with hidden costs when adding new team members or integrating new roasting hardware into their existing software environment.

Furthermore, the company has released a suite of six free digital calculators at roastconsole.com/tools, designed to assist roasters with common tasks such as calculating roast loss percentages, pricing wholesale coffee, and managing inventory aging. By offering these tools, Farspeak Labs is positioning itself not just as a software vendor, but as a technical partner for specialty roasteries seeking to improve their operational rigor.

Industry Implications and Economic Context

The release of RoastConsole comes at a pivotal time for the coffee industry. Rising green coffee costs, supply chain volatility, and increasing labor expenses have forced roasteries to become more data-driven. The ability to track a batch from the raw green inventory to the final invoice allows roastery owners to see their margins with granular precision.

In many instances, the "true cost" of a roast is obscured by administrative latency. When a roastery spends hours each week manually reconciling invoices against inventory usage, that time represents a direct cost that reduces overall profitability. By automating these processes, RoastConsole enables roasters to reallocate labor toward quality control, product development, or business growth.

"The roast, the green, and the order were never separate things," said Jenaro Lopez in the lead-up to the launch. "But the software sold to roasteries split them into separate products and left us to hold them together. RoastConsole keeps that record whole, so the work we already do lands in one place and stays connected."

Strategic Positioning

Farspeak Labs’ decision to price the software based on volume rather than user count reflects a growing trend in B2B SaaS (Software as a Service) toward value-based, inclusive pricing. For a small roastery with a large team, per-seat pricing can be prohibitively expensive, effectively penalizing the company for hiring more staff. By removing seat-based pricing, RoastConsole encourages roasteries to integrate their entire staff into the system, thereby improving communication and operational transparency across the organization.

The inclusion of a mobile application—RoastConsole Mobile for iPhone—also highlights the necessity of mobility in the modern roasting environment. Whether checking on the status of a pending order while away from the office or reviewing roast profiles from the warehouse floor, the ability to access a unified database remotely is increasingly viewed as a baseline requirement for modern coffee businesses.

Future Outlook

As Farspeak Labs moves into its post-launch phase, the focus for the team will likely be on customer acquisition and iterative updates based on user feedback. The company has explicitly avoided the venture-capital-heavy, "growth-at-all-costs" model, opting instead for a self-funded approach rooted in the actual needs of working roasters.

The success of this model will depend on the platform’s ability to scale alongside its users. As roasteries grow from small, single-roaster operations into regional wholesale suppliers, the software must handle increased transaction volumes and more complex inventory requirements. However, the founders’ background as industry practitioners provides them with a distinct advantage in anticipating these growth pains.

In an industry where innovation is often focused on sensory outcomes—such as new fermentation techniques or advanced roasting technology—Farspeak Labs is highlighting the importance of "operational innovation." By stabilizing the back-end infrastructure of the coffee business, they are providing a foundation that allows roasters to focus on their primary objective: the production of high-quality coffee.

The availability of a 14-day, no-credit-card-required trial period signals confidence in the product’s usability and immediate value. As the coffee sector continues to embrace digital transformation, platforms like RoastConsole are poised to become central to the infrastructure of modern, efficient, and profitable roasteries. Interested parties can access the software and the accompanying suite of calculators at roastconsole.com.