Roasts vs. Products: What's the difference?
Roasts are what you make. Products are what you sell. Here's how the two work together in RoasterTools — and why keeping them separate saves you time.
Overview:
How Roasts and Products Work Together
What's the Difference?
The distinction comes down to branding:
- Roasts are your building blocks — the coffee itself, before any branding. This is where you set the recipe: what green coffee goes in, and the expected weight loss percentage.
- Products are your finished goods — the final item your customers order. This is where you set visibility options, coffee recipe pulling either from one single origin (roasts) or one blend, label cost, pricing, and customer-specific naming.
A quick way to remember it: if the change affects how the coffee is roasted, it belongs in the roast. If it affects how the bag looks or what the customer pays, it belongs in the product.
How Roasts and Products Work Together
Here's a real-world example. Say you roast a single origin Colombian, and you sell it four different ways:
- In-house, as a single origin under your own brand
- To one wholesale customer who sells it as their "House Coffee" under their brand
- To a second wholesale customer who sells it as a single origin Colombia under their brand
- To a third wholesale customer who uses it as their espresso and shelves it as "House Espresso"
On the production side, that's all the same coffee. Same green, same roast curve, one roast record.
On the wholesale side, those are four unique finished goods. Each one may need its own label and its own pricing structure for that customer.
Once the roast is set up, you can apply it to as many products as you need.
Why This Matters for Private Label and Toll Roasting
This structure earns its keep when you're building accounts where you're doing private label, toll roasting, or exclusive branding. Those are great services to offer wholesale customers, but they're also where production gets confusing and error-prone.
Because every product points back to a roast, you can change how the coffee is made — swapping the greens you're using, for example — in one place. You don't have to hunt through every finished good that uses that coffee.
Heads up: Because a single roast can feed multiple products, a change to the roast affects every product tied to it. Double-check which products are linked before you edit a roast.
Tips & FAQs
Q: Do I need to create a roast before I create a product?
A: Yes. Products are built from roasts, so the roast needs to exist first.
Q: Can more than one product use the same roast?
A: Yes — that's the whole point. One roast can feed as many products as you need, each with its own branding and pricing.
Q: I need to change the greens in one of my coffees. Where do I do that?
A: On the roast, not on the product. That change flows through to every product using that roast.
Q: Why does my product list look so much longer than my roast list?
A: That's expected, and it's a sign the feature is working. You'll typically have more finished goods than roasts.